For a surprisingly long time, there's been no way to look up Twitter users by name. Twitter used to offer a people search feature, but removed it when the service was experiencing some technical difficulties. Today the microblogging service has relaunched Twitter Name Search with a few improvements thrown in for good measure.

The new name search is faster and attempts to find names that are similar to the words you type into the engine. So if you mispell a name, Twitter will try to help you find the correct user anyway.

Results are ranked by the number of followers each user has. You can search for users by clicking the "find people" button on the upper right side of the page.

[via VentureBeat]