WASHINGTON - Micro-blogging service Twitter has unveiled a new frontpage featuring a prominent search box in a bid to attract new users.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, in a blog post about the redesign, said it was intended to demonstrate "the power of Twitter as a discovery engine for what is happening right now."

The search box will allow Web surfers who have not signed up for Twitter to plug in a query and see the latest real-time messages, known as "tweets," about the subject of their query.

Stone said this would hopefully inspire people to then sign up for Twitter, which allows users to broadcast messages of 140 characters or less to other members.

"Twitter has moved from simple social networking into a new kind of communication and a valuable source of timely information," he said.

"We have a lot of work to do when it comes to the quality of our search results and trend analysis," Stone acknowledged.

"But repositioning the product to focus more on discovery is an important first step in presenting Twitter to a wider audience of folks around the world who are eager to start engaging with new people, ideas, opinions, events, and sources of information," he said.

The redesign does not affect the Twitter homepage seen by current users of the service, only the introductory page at Twitter.com seen by Internet users who have not yet signed up for the service.

--AFP