Meta-owned social network Threads is finally testing a “recent” filter that sorts search results by newest. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said Monday that this is a limited test and the feature will only be available to a small number of people.
“As we begin testing with a small group of people, we are making it easier to find relevant search results in real time,” he said in a reply to users.
Users who participated in the test posted that they saw “Top” and “Recent” filters on their search results screen. They pointed out that while the “Recent” filter is not strictly chronological, it does a better job of showing the most recent posts than the “Top” filter.
Earlier this year, the company accidentally introduced an option to sort search results by newest. At the time, the company said it was an “in-house prototype available to a small number of people.”
Last November, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said Threads would not have the ability to search for real-time results because it could create a “safety loophole.”
“To be clear, creating a comprehensive list of *all* posts containing a particular word, in chronological order, will inevitably result in spammers and other bad actors simply adding related words or tags. By just adding more, you're bombarding views with content. Before you ask why we don't remove that bad content, there's far more content that people don't want to see than we can or should remove. “Please understand that there are a lot of them,” Mosseri said at the time, explaining why Threads didn't have an option to sort search results.