Comments on: Twitter’s “Real-Time Search” Ain’t That Hard

By: An Able Grape at the Helm of Twitter Search « AltSearchEngines

An Able Grape at the Helm of Twitter Search « AltSearchEngines — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:55:08 +0000

[...] link-baited Summize founder and Twitter Chief Scientist Abdur Chowdhury here once or twice, but I understand that he’s no longer running Twitter Search. They’ve got a new guy, [...]

By: A Scaling Challenge for Twitter Search | The Noisy Channel

A Scaling Challenge for Twitter Search | The Noisy Channel — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 05:35:47 +0000

[...] other day, I explained why, as far as I can tell, Twitter’s existing search functionality isn’t that hard to implement. In a subsequent post, I argued that Twitter is not a search engine, an opinion that seems to place [...]

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:02:06 +0000

I suspect that, given the small size of messages, it is probably better to associate authority scores with users than with messages–though quite possibly to make those authority scores multidimensional (e.g., this user is authoritative on software but not on politics) and transparent to users. But yes, it’s a long road to get there from here.

By: Thomas Kjelsrud

Thomas Kjelsrud — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 14:43:52 +0000

Very good article! But as always in these discussions lately, little or no emphasis is put on relevancy. Which is a hurdle at this point, Retweets are not really linked in a way that lets us measure which tweets are “good” and not.. futher more, the use of several url services makes it difficult to find a consistent way to measure link popularity (like Google Page Rank). And, last but not least – there is so much chatter on twitter – even if the technology works out – there might be huge amounts of unrelated comments in the results as most people try to maximize their exposure by using as many tags as possible. Sorry for the long rant!

By: Twitter is Not a Search Engine | The Noisy Channel

Twitter is Not a Search Engine | The Noisy Channel — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:48:23 +0000

[...] No relevance ranking, user-specified sorting, query refinement, etc. I talked about it in a previous post. If Twitter wants to be taken seriously as a search engine (and I’m not sure that they do), [...]

By: Valencio

Valencio — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:41:22 +0000

I am actually a huge fan of twitter and its search function, with keywords tied to links.. I think Google should not dismiss twitter as such..

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:47:26 +0000

Abdur, I’m honored to see you here at The Noisy Channel! Have you or any of your colleagues ever published any details of how you maintain search.twitter.com? Of course I understand if you feel the need to keep these details secret for competitiveness reasons.

By: Abdur

Abdur — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:06:38 +0000

Nice post… Not sure I would agree with the “Ain’t That Hard”, but either way real-time search over Twitter has value that is just different from other search products. Results change as you sit there, click-through is to engage in conversation with someone, etc…

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:33:48 +0000

I’m a big fan of Twitter’s search function, and the feed published on this blog is a good example of how I use it. But just because it’s useful doesn’t mean it would be hard to replicate.

By: Daniel Lemire

Daniel Lemire — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:30:23 +0000

Google is pretty good at indexing content quickly, if Google Reader is any indication.

I honestly don’t use Twitter’s search function all that much.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:25:53 +0000

Jonathan, that goal analysis is great! Also, here's a link to a past post about alerting spam.

By: Jonathan Mendez

Jonathan Mendez — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:57:17 +0000

Excellent technical analysis. complements my goal analysis http://bit.ly/1456Jd quite well.

Interestingly Fred Wilson mentioned a forthcoming real-time search Q&A feature for Twitter today on his blog. Seems like some real SEO juice but also a recipe for spamming that Twitter has not really had to confront yet at scale.

RTS is a “vertical” and Twitter maybe more closely aligned with a site search like Endeca than anything else.

By: Joe Cardillo

Joe Cardillo — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:46:19 +0000

I think you’re right that Twitter has a strong search capability. The main difference between traditional search engines like Google and Twitter—never thought I’d be calling Google traditional —is that the content serves a different purpose. At least for now.

Google’s content has been quantified monetarily, so anytime you are searching anything you are still getting both the pulse of what’s on people’s minds, but also advertising/marketing, etc. Versus Twitter which for now continues to be mostly a way to see what’s on people’s minds.

Even experiments like the Skittles website still haven’t managed to put an ad value on Twitter. But obviously that is something marketing folks are working on. I’m sure Ev and Biz have thought about that plenty, (Suicide Girls interview touches on it http://snipurl.com/d2wjl ).

I like the current Twitter search function. It’s clean, simple and isn’t designed for advertising/marketing. For now your point about content being human generated is true, so it’ll be interesting to see how they deal with spambots or similar accounts.