Twitter Pumps Search

May 7, 2009

Newsfactor here and other Web news services posted stories about Twitter getting a dose of search steroids. You will want to read “Not-for-Sale Twitter Is Expanding Search Functionality” by Patricia Resende to get the details. Ms. Resende wrote:

Twitter Search will be used to crawl information from links by Twitters to analyze and then index the content for future use, Jayaram, a former vice president for search quality at Google, told Webware. Currently Twitter Search is only used to search words included in tweets, but not words in links. Along with its new crawling functionality, Twitter Search will also get a ranking system. When users do a search on trending topics — the top-10 topics people tweet about, which get their own link on the Twitter sidebar — Twitter will analyze the reputation of the tweet writer and rank search results partially based on that.

To me, I think this scoring will be an important step. Here’s why:

Clickstream metrics by individuals about topics, links, and words provide important clues to smart software
Individuals with large numbers of followers provide “stakes in the sand” for making some type of subjective, value-centric calculation; for example, a person with more followers can be interpreted as an “authority”
Individuals who post large number of results and have followers and topics add additional scoring dimensions for calculating “reputation” and other squishy notions.

A number of commercial content processing companies are in the “reputation” and subjective scoring game, but Twitter is a free (for now) real time service with a large volume of posts. The combination makes Twitter a potential dark horse in the reputation analysis game. Believe me. That game has some high stakes. Nonsense about waiting in line at a restaurant becomes high value data when one can identify high score folks standing in line multiple times per week. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the restaurant is doing something right. The score may not be a Zagat type report, but it works pretty well for making certain types of marketing scans useful.

Twitter on steroids plus real time search. More than teen craziness I assert.

Stephen Arnold, May 8, 2009

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Online (general), Real time search, Search, Social, Technology, Text processing

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.