Twitter has updated its mobile app for iOS and Android, improving the search and discovery functions.

Announcing the updates in a blog post, Twitter's engineering manager of Search and Relevance Daniel Loreto said users can now preview article summaries and photos in both Search and Discover without having to access the stories.

The update brings improved search features to the app and on the web, and shows photo and video results at the top of search results. This includes new tailored ranking, highlighting a specific tweet by showing users who favorited or retweeted it.

The update also means that users will see tweets in Discover with links to news and photos rather than the former story previews, which were not interactive.

"We want Discover to be the place where you find the best of that content relevant to you, even if you don't necessarily know everyone involved," Loreto said. "For this new release, we've completely redone the backend and user interface to take advantage of Twitter cards."

The rather pointless "Twitter cards" allows users to attach "media experiences" to tweets that link to content.

"Supporting Twitter cards on the backend means we can more directly improve the user experience in our native apps," Loreto added. "You'll see content from cards partners display as previews in the stream, so that you'll get headlines and publication names for story summaries and photo previews rather than shortened URLs."

Twitter said that this means fewer mouse clicks or touchscreen taps, fewer screen views, and more content, faster.

Twitter's updated app is available now from the iOS and Android app stores.

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