Meta’s X competitor Instagram Threads is gaining an improved search interface, the company announced on Monday. The app, which offers a Meta-run alternative to Elon Musk’s X, but built on top of Instagram’s social graph, is rolling out a new way to search for specific posts, allowing users to filter searches by user profiles and date ranges.
This is not as comprehensive as X’s advanced search, which today lets users narrow queries by language, keywords, exact phrases, excluded words, hashtags, and more. But it does make it easier for Threads users to locate specific posts. It will also bring Threads’ search more on par with Bluesky’s search, which also allows users to filter searches by user profiles, date ranges, and more, using advanced queries. However, the Bluesky app itself doesn’t surface all the filtering options in its user interface as of yet.
Before this latest update, Threads search has been fairly basic. You could search by a keyword or keywords but only filter those results by two options — either “Top” for the posts with the most engagement, or “Recent” for the latest posts.
The new search functionality will be available to global users in the weeks ahead, noted the Threads account in a new post.
In recent days, Meta has been quickly releasing new features to combat the threat from social networking startup Bluesky, which has rapidly gained adoption as another X alternative. In September, Bluesky had north of 9 million users, but that number has soared in the weeks following the U.S. elections, as users left X over the political leanings of owner Elon Musk and various policy changes, such as plans to change how blocks work and to allow AI companies to train on X user data. Today, Bluesky claims nearly 24 million users.
To counter Bluesky’s potential, Meta’s Threads released new features, including the ability for users to choose their own default feed, a design change that makes it easier to move between feeds, and an updated algorithm. It was also spotted developing its own take on Bluesky’s user-curated recommendation lists, called Starter Packs.
