Medium Changes Search

Change is the only Constant!

Ever since the founder of Medium, Ev Williams announced the changes to Medium’s in-house publications, writers on the platform have been preparing for changes.

Guess what, we did not have to wait long!

The minute I read Dr Mehmet Yildiz’s post about Medium publications not being searchable, I became curious! (and maybe anxious!) The post I am referring to is linked below:

True enough, the Search functionality is now changed. There is nothing in Publications! Don’t worry, by the way- the above post also has a solution!

And if you read the responses like me, you can find that publications are now clubbed with Members!!

I feel the whole appearance of Search has changed, starting with the autocomplete that now displays differently. Here is a screenshot as I typed Illumination:

I am happy that I see top results in people, Publications, and Tags. Clicking on the Publication or Person also takes you to the correct link.

But if I do not select and hit enter and go to the full page of Search, Publications returns nothing!

On delving deeper, it seems that the People tab contains the Publications. Yes, it’s true. For the term ‘Illumination’, I not only viewed said publication but even got ‘Illumination-Curated’.

Sigh!

The former software tester in me is moaning and groaning at this!

However, I like how the Search itself is a bit better now. On my profile, for instance, I can actually search better by terms. Something that was lacking earlier. I used the same term and this is what I saw:

Now, I no longer have to scroll through all my articles or go for generic searches! This is golden because it makes embedding posts easier. I usually have to open a different tab and sift through my posts to get the right link if God forbid, I wished to interlink my earlier posts. So, this is useful. And of course, the full platform-wide search is also still available.

The feature worked on publications too- though this is not something that I can vouch to be new. For what it’s worth, I double-checked:

What do you think of this updated Search function? Good or Blah?

Do you think we will see more changes on the platform following their changing priorities?