This is a good update.

Today, Twitter has finally launched keyword search for DMs, providing a means to locate specific mentions within any DM text, so you can track down past conversations, products and people mentioned, links shared, etc.

As you can see here, Twitter’s updates DM search options now filter your queries into four segments:

• All – Which displays all the results for your query, including username and key term matches
• People – Highlights relevant usernames based on your search term
• Groups – Shows group chats that use your search term
• Messages – Which now displays any keyword matches in specific DMs

That’ll make it a lot easier to scan through your DMs, and will provide more functionality for using DMs in a broader range of ways, especially for customer service and chasing up past responses and engagements.

The project has been in the works for over a year, with Debugger reporting last March that Twitter was looking to roll out DM keyword search. Up till now, you’ve only been able to search your DMs by username – which is helpful, but doesn’t give you the full capacity to look up relevant mentions and terms within your private messages.

But now you can, which, as noted, will open up a range of new options, and will make your DMs a more useful, and helpful resource, in a range of ways.

Twitter has experimented with more advanced DM search features in the past, like searching in a specific DM thread for shared media and links.

But the capacity to search by message content is arguably the most significant development, and it’s good to finally have the functionality available, so we can start experimenting with what we can find.

And again, for brands, improved customer service response is the most obvious benefit. Providing more search tools will help to streamline your DM response – for example, you can now search for all users who’ve asked a question about a product, then provide relevant updates as they come to hand, or you can look up past answers to similar queries, saving you time in response.

There’s a range of ways it could be used – Twitter’s new DM search options are rolling out to all users from today.