Have you been wanting to find a community to yell at on Threads? Well, today is your day.
When Instagram launched Threads at the beginning of July, it launched with a Search tab in the app. However, that Search tab only let you search for one thing: accounts. While that was helpful for people to find brands and others that they wanted to follow, that excitement died quick,ly and the desire to search for posts grew fast. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri promised that searching for posts would be coming, but would not specify exactly when it was launching.
Zuckerberg actually got quite cryptic about it last week, going as far as to post a GIF of Vin Deisel with no other information about when the feature would show up.
Well, the wait is over. Proper search on Threads is finally rolling out...kind of. Zuckerberg took to the platform today to announce that the ability to search for posts is rolling out now, but only to English and Spanish-speaking countries. What if you speak another language? Zuckerberg says that it will be bringing the updated search to more languages "soon." The CEO provided no sense as to how long they consider soon to be.
If you're looking for the new search experience, just force quit Threads on your phone and relaunch it. That was able to work for me. As previously reported, the new search feature appears to be a simple keyword search as opposed to implementing any kind of hashtag experience. I tried searching for "iPhone" and was able to look through any post that mentioned the word.
Interestingly, it appears that the results of the search are not served chronologically. When scrolling through the search results, I was served with some posts that were written in as soon as a few minutes but, mixed in, were other posts that were from hours or days ago. It appears that Threads is trying to apply some kind of algorithm to mix in posts that are more relevant with posts that are more recent, but it is unclear exactly how it works.
Threads, an app by Instagram Image source: José Adorno for BGR
While it is great to have a way to search for posts, I hope that Threads quickly adds the ability to sort results chronologically. This is especially helpful during big events, such as sports games and — for all of us tech nerds — an Apple event. I want to stay on top of people's thoughts while things are happening! While it can also be helpful to see what thoughts are most popular, a stream of posts has its place too.
As Threads rolls out its new way to search for posts, X (formerly known as Twitter) recently updated its privacy policy, looking for users to provide access to their employment, education, and biometric data in order to support its new Hiring and potential authentication features. While I'll personally hold off on that one, I'm sure many people will be happy to provide it. If there's one sure thing about data that I know — people tend to choose convenience over privacy.
