Many Telegram users, especially administrators of public channels and groups, noticed at the end of August 2024 that the platform administration had changed the global search algorithms. Those channels and groups that could previously be found in the search by name and/or public username («username»), stopped appearing in search results, that is, they received the so-called “shadow ban”.
@tginfo tells what is known about these changes. Please note: this article only talks about searching for chats you are not a member of. Searching for chats you are a member of works differently.
- Telegram almost never published any information about how the search works and what determines whether a particular channel or chat will be included in its results. However, sometimes this does happen. A rare example of such a publication is, for example, a post by Pavel Durov from September 16, 2023, in which he writes the following: “For example, channels with a large number of Premium subscribers are usually ranked higher. However, if a particular Premium subscriber joins too many channels, he will not give these channels a big boost in the search ranking. Of course, the new search also gives priority to results from your country.”
- Throughout September 2024, the search results were constantly changing. Channels disappeared from the search results, then returned there again, and this could be repeated many times. Only on September 23, Pavel Durov officially confirmed in a post on his channel that the search had changed: “Over the past few weeks, a special team of moderators, using artificial intelligence, made Telegram search much safer. All problematic content that we found in the search is no longer available.”
- Shadow bans were given not only to channels and groups with restricted content, but also to those whose messages do not violate the rules. For example, the @tginfoen channel also disappeared from the search several times and reappeared there again, although its content does not belong to any of the categories prohibited even by the new, stricter rules of the platform.
- Also, over the past few weeks, users have regularly encountered the fact that it is impossible to find recently created accounts by usernames in search. It is unknown whether such accounts will become visible in search later.
- The platform administration does not provide any special methods of communication by which the owners of public channels and groups can request information about the shadowban of their chats or appeal such a ban:
- The official @SearchReport bot, which Pavel Durov mentions, is intended only for complaints about restricted content.
- Among the methods of communication that we wrote about earlier in the article “How to contact Telegram?”, there is also not a single one that is even remotely suitable for appealing a shadowban.
Many administrators expect that the search algorithms will continue to change in the near future, and their channels will again be successfully found by global search. @tginfo team supposes there is no reason to believe that Telegram will return the search algorithms to their previous form: users have no way to inform the platform administration about incorrect search, which means that Telegram may simply not be aware of the scale of these errors.
Nevertheless, there is always hope for an improvement in the situation: Telegram almost never announces its future plans, and positive changes can also be made suddenly.