• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 6, 2022

It appears that Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, has a strategy to improve search on the platform, and acknowledged that "fixing search is a high priority."

On Saturday, Musk tweeted: "Search within Twitter reminds me of Infoseek in '98! That will also get a lot better pronto."

The tweet set off a firestorm of recommendations, such as the ability to "integrate an attachment to tweets strictly for links and citations," and integrating advanced Twitter Search into the main app. 

"Only way to power search, many use it often, and it's a broken experience since it lives on its own IRL," tweeted Michael Miraflor. chief brand officer at Hannah Grey VC.

A Twitter designer, Andrea Conway, responded to Miraflor's tweet, writing: "totally agree. We've been working on it."

Carolina, who goes by the Twitter handle, @carolicek, wants a filter for tweets with links, photo, and video, language, and time range -- and to suggests showing ghost tweets, perhaps deleted in a lighter color. "Too much to ask if you could look for chronology/contexts tweets for that time/topic?" she wrote. 

Senior research analyst at Baird Equity Research Colin Sebastian wrote and published a research note on his thoughts about Twitter's search capabilities in late October following the close the acquisition.

“Twitter is a unique real-time digital broadcast platform,” Sebastian wrote. “The potential as a search engine is huge, and mostly unrecognized, except perhaps by Google, which has licensed Twitter content.”

There has also been an unfavorable response to Musk's purchase of Twitter. Searches globally for “How to delete Twitter” rose by 500% in the week from October 24 to October 31, 2022. 

The worst, Insider reports, is that Twitter employees continue to flood the forum Blind with bad — and some good — reviews about the company and its new CEO. The community app gives employees a place to anonymously write reviews and post about their workplaces.

Most of the 953 reviews, written since 2020, were written and posted before the mass layoff on Friday.

The change in ownership continues to change who uses it and who doesn’t. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gained more than 96,000 followers in just a couple of days, while Barack Obama lost more than 300,000, according to the Observer.

Twitter also began advertising the launch of its paid subscription service that includes a blue check mark to authenticate the user in Apple's app store on Saturday.

Android phones will come next. Users will now need to pay $7.99 monthly for the company’s blue checkmark on the platform if they want to be verified.