Twitter Begins Sorting Search Results By Relevance

In another move away from reverse chronological listings, Twitter will pull up search results by relevance. It hopes to improve the search function by showing potentially more relevant information rather than just listing every tweet with a matching keyword.

This move follows Twitter's addition of "relevant" content to the main timeline earlier this year.

Senior software engineer Lisa Huang says the network's fast-moving nature often means the most recent tweets aren't the ones people care about seeing.

Twitter will heavily rely on user engagement to figure out what content should be displayed first. If more people are clicking on something, Twitter's initial position is that it's likely relevant. Other factors will contribute to the rankings.

Here's an example of the old vs new rankings.