Twitch improves stream discovery with search revamp
You can now live search videos, games and users all at once.
Twitch search has never been bad, per se, but it's fair to say that plenty of folks discover streams by other means -- social links, Google or just by scanning the front page. The site is making an effort to improve discoverability on its own site with a new search function. It now updates in real time across games, live channels, users and video, giving you multiple options when you're searching keywords. Hitting "more" will give you a full list of results in each category, ordered by popularity.
Amazon purchased Twitch in 2014 for nearly $1 billion, but the streaming service is now facing formidable competition from Facebook. The social network just announced it would team with Blizzard to stream the studio's games on Facebook Live. That, along with new streaming services from YouTube Gaming and others, may have motivated Twitch to get its services up to snuff -- both Google (obviously) and Facebook have formidable search. Twitch doesn't have the userbase of those sites, but its 100 million unique visitors per month are rabid: Each spends an hour and 46 minutes per day on the site, and they sent over 9 billion messages in 2015.
