Twitter announced on Wednesday that the DM search has received a major upgrade – it can now search through the content of your conversations and return specific messages containing any keyword you type. 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 with a friend about “chili”, you can just type it 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 – useful if the keyword you’re trying to search for happens to be someone’s name.
We know you’ve been waiting for the option to search your DMs…
Now you can use the search bar in your inbox to find specific messages with keywords and names. pic.twitter.com/A41G8Y45QI
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) March 23, 2022
This change has been going on for a long time. 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 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.
When I tried it out myself, the improved search seemed to work on the web, as well as the iOS and Android apps. While it can search fairly old posts, it doesn’t seem to search them all – it dug up results from 2020, but for my account, it didn’t include results from 2019 or earlier. (It’s worth noting that attempts to search for people’s names also seemed only so far back.)