by Michelle Lentz

FINALLY!

How many times have you clicked that Find People link at the top of Twitter, only to be rebuffed by a “This is not active/working” type of message? I’ve clicked it repeatedly, only to be disappointed.

It’s now working. Officially called Twitter Name Search, you can now search for people by their actual names. It’s not the smartest of searches – for instance, I couldn’t search on anything except a name. It’s not picking up words in profiles. (For that, you can use Twellow.)

According to Evan Williams, the new search feature is smarter than it used to be:

… new name search is much faster, more relevant, and it even has a phonetic similarity algorithm which is basically fancy talk for spell check on names. For example, if you type in “Even Williamz” it will ask you, “Did you mean Evan Williams?”

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