Threads Updates Search and Trending Features

Meta promises “long overdue improvements” to its X competitor, Threads, including more precise search functionality and expanded trending topics.

First, users will be able to search for posts within a specific date range or from a single account—similar to what X’s search allows. Threads is also testing a new US trends page that includes additional topics, as well as AI-generated summaries of what’s happening. what other users are saying.

Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, who led the launch of Threads, wrote in the post that the tests will begin today.

This week has been full of updates about Threads, which is facing increasing competition from Bluesky, the decentralized text platform that people have been flocking to in recent weeks. Earlier this week, Threads introduced a custom channels option that allows users to pin multiple curated channels to the home page. Users can create custom feeds for specific topics or accounts, giving them more flexibility beyond an algorithmic recommendation feed or reverse chronological feed. This feature has been around on Bluesky for a while now, and Meta announced and released its own copycat version in just a few days.

A long-standing complaint about Threads is that the default home feed is filled with irrelevant, sometimes annoying content from accounts users don’t follow (Bluesky’s default feed is the opposite). Just yesterday, Mosseri reported that Meta is tweaking the Threads algorithm to prioritize posts from people you follow, which is a significant change to how the platform ranks content. There are still questions about whether this change will actually make Threads more timely – while it may be many times larger than Bluesky, logging in and seeing messages from two days ago makes Threads feel dead.

Bluesky has seen explosive growth over the past couple of weeks: that’s up to 20 million usersand this week it added a million new users every day. It’s still small potatoes compared to Threads’ user base, but it’s clearly doing something right – and perhaps giving Meta something to worry about.