Twitter’s DM search will finally help you find conversations

Twitter announced on Wednesday that the DM search function has received a major upgrade – it can now search the content of your conversations and return specific messages that contain the keyword you entered. Previously, you could only use it to search for people’s names or group chat names, but now if you want to find that one conversation you had with a friend about Chili, you can just type it into the search bar.

Of course, searching by person or conversation name still works, and you can even choose to see results for people, groups, or messages — handy if the keyword you’re searching for happens to be a person’s name.

This change has been a long time coming. At Twitter DM Search brought to Android in May 2021 it said that content search would be coming later this year. The company seems to have missed that deadline a bit, but at least it’s available on every platform – the original search was available on iOS for almost two years before Twitter added it to Android.

I tested it myself and the improved search seemed to work across the web as well as the iOS and Android apps. While it can search reasonably old messages, it doesn’t seem to search all – it dug up results from 2020, but to my knowledge it didn’t include any results from 2019 or earlier. (It’s worth noting that attempts to search by people’s names only seemed to look back so far, too.)