How Twitter is making its top search results more relevant than recent

Twitter is all about “live,” but its platform can’t all be live because recent doesn’t always equal relevant. Twitter proved this in February when it introduced a digest-style mini-feed in its main timeline that shows a sample of tweets someone might find most relevant even if they’re not the most recent. The company has quietly done a similar thing with its search results pages. In September, Twitter started sorting the top-most tweets on its default search results pages based on how relevant they are to the search query, rather than ordering them in reverse-chronological order as it had previously done. The relevance-based order only applies to the first handful or so of tweets atop the search results, with the rest sorted in reverse-chronological order. If people want to simply see the most recent tweets related to their search query, they can still find the reverse-chronological firehose under the “latest” tab on the search results page. Even though the newish top tweets section favors relevance over recency, recency remains a strong signal, according to a Twitter spokesperson.