Twitter's DM Search will Finally Help you Find Conversations

Twitter announced Wednesday that its DM search feature has received a big update: It can now search the content of your conversations and return specific messages containing any keyword you type. Before you could only use it to search for people's names or the names of group chats, but now if you want to find that conversation you had with a friend about "movie", you can type this into the search bar.

Of course, searching for names of people or conversations still works, and you can even decide whether you want to see results for people, groups, or messages — will be handy if the keyword you're trying to search for happens to be someone's name.

This change has been a long time coming. When Twitter brought DM search to Android in May 2021, it said the content search would come later that year. The company seems to have missed that deadline by a bit, but at least it's available on all platforms: The original search was available on iOS for nearly two years before Twitter added it to Android.

Testing it myself, the enhanced search seemed to work on the web as well as in the iOS and Android apps. While it can search for reasonably old messages, it doesn't seem to search them all: it dug up results from 2020, but in my account, it didn't include any results from 2019 or earlier. (It's worth noting that attempts to look up people's names also seemed to only look back.)