Twitter Announcement: the popular micro-blogging site adds search autocomplete function and ‘People you follow’ results.

[Photo Credit: Official Twitter Blog]

Twitter made an announcement on its official blog (http://blog.twitter.com/) on Friday, July 6, that it has expanded its search capabilities.

“We’re constantly working to make Twitter search the simplest way to discover what’s happening in real time. To that end, today we’re introducing search autocomplete and ‘People you follow’ search results to Twitter.com,” Twitter engineer Frost Li said on the Twitter blog.

First, the “search autocomplete” function shows to Twitter users the related terms for their queries while they are typing. This is notably useful if you’re trying to follow the hashtag for an event or you’re looking for a certain Twitter account. Just line on Facebook, you can now select your query from the drop-down menu even before you finish typing the term. And if ever you misspell a term, Twitter will automatically show results for your intended query.

Aside from spelling corrections, Twitter will now provide related suggestions for your query. If you search for a topic for which people use multiple terms, Twitter will provide relevant suggestions for terms where the majority of that conversation is happening on Twitter.

As for the names and usernames, Twitter will display results mentioning that person’s real name (and other people with similar names) followed by the user account username.

Another interesting improvement mentioned in the Twitter announcement is that users will now be able to see tweets about a given topic from only those people they follow. When you select the “People you follow” view, you can see tweets about a given topic from only the people you follow. This feature will also allow the user to join the conversation about the topic being queried.