Twitter set to overhaul search capabilities

Twitter is set to overhaul its search and discovery capabilities to improve the service's functions. The move marks another potential threat to Google's dominance of the search market.

The personalisation and recommender systems group lead at Twitter, Pankaj Gupta, revealed the plans on a message on the site late on 6 July.

Search & discovery in @twitter set to change forever after tmrw. Team - congrats and enjoy the enormity of ur impact few understand today!

— Pankaj Gupta (@pankaj) July 6, 2012

Gupta didn't provide any more insights on the update but the move is not hugely surprising as the firm continues in its efforts to enhance its service to compete with Google in the search market.

Both Twitter and Facebook represents significant threats to Google in the search market as they have access to a huge wealth of social data on internet users preferences that could be used to deliver more targeted results.

This is one of the core reasons why Google launched its Google+ service, in order to gather more information on the social preferences of its users.

The search giant also stopped indexing Twitter search results last year in response to the growing threat posed by the micro-blogging site.