Twitter has been slowly transforming itself into a post-Google information company. In past few weeks alone it has unveiled expandable tweets, hashtag-based pages and other similar innovations. These embellishments to their core messaging offering show that it is Twitter, and not Facebook, that Google has to worry about.

Twitter’s search ambitions are becoming clearer with the people it is adding to its search team. For instance, it recently hired away John Wang, a well-known engineer in the search business from LinkedIn. In addition, the company added Ruslan Belkin as a Director of Engineering, Search and Relevance. Twitter has also made its search better, or at least faster, as it noted in a blog post. They have added related queries and spelling suggestions to their search.

Offering personalized search with more relevant results, surfacing related images and videos related to the query are somewhat reminiscent of the efforts made by Google on its search offering.

But just like Google’s idea of search was very different from the search offered by web directories such as Lycos and Yahoo, Twitter too has to re-imagine the idea of search.

The answer to that question for Twitter is its “discover” function. Honestly, discover could use a lot of help and improvement. On our touch-centric and voice enabled devices of the future, the idea of search has to be less textual. So Twitter as a company needs to be making it easy for us to surface all the information.

This post was updated at 12:44p.m. to clarify that Twitter recently introduced expandable tweets, not embedded tweets.

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