People are speculating what this means.

Twitter has more than 140 million active users, and its traffic amounts to more than 340 million tweets per day.

It's a good time to do something significant with search.

But what?

Personalized search, perhaps?

http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-pankaj-gupta-search-discovery-2012-7

"So from the evolution of Twitter's product—into something resembling social news reader Flipboard—and from Gupta's past work, odds are pretty good that Twitter is rolling out improvements that use social signals based on the accounts users follow to deliver smarter search results and related tweets and accounts."

Deborah, if Twitter is becoming more like Flipboard I wonder if that will make Twitter's core base unhappy.

Ok, so here's what Twitter announced for search:

1. Spelling corrections: If you misspell a term, we’ll automatically show results for your intended query.

2. Related suggestions: If you search for a topic for which people use multiple terms, we will provide relevant suggestions for terms where the majority of that conversation is happening on Twitter.

3. Results with real names and usernames: When you search for a name like ‘Jeremy Lin,’ you’ll see results mentioning that person’s real name and their Twitter account username.

4. Results from people you follow: In addition to seeing ‘All’ or ‘Top’ Tweets for your search, you can also now see Tweets about a given topic from only the people you follow when you select the ‘People you follow’ view. Viewing Tweets about a topic from just the people you follow is a great way to find useful information and join the conversation.

Read more.

Here's a brilliant comment from Chuck Van Cort on the TechCrunch article Twitter Search Adds “Search Within People You Follow”, Autocomplete, Related Results.

"Amazing that Twitter is still able to keep the release of basic functionality like this to such a slow pace. Very few products have that luxury."