Twitter Search a Quitter
May 23, 2009
Louis Gray’s “Twitter’s Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken” here underscored the plight of those engaged in information retrieval. Mr. Gray wrote:
The promise of Twitter’s advanced search capability is tremendous – letting you dice your queries by the sender and recipient, and even limiting the date range for said tweets, the location, hashtags or even emoticons. And at one time, it was a valuable resource. Now, depending on which account you’re viewing, the data set could be as small as a week, or oddly, in some cases, not available at all.
If I waddled my addled goose body from pond to keyboard, I could make the same assertion about any search and retrieval system with which I am familiar. In fact, I have been clear about the challenges of search and retrieval. I track about 350 vendors with my monitoring tools, and I could point to examples of problems with any of these companies’ systems.
So, flawed search is nothing new.
Some quick illustrations. You may be able to replicate these queries yourself, but some examples perform differently at different times.
First, Microsoft’s Live Search. Run this query: “educational materials”. Scan the results. My set is biased toward state sources and health. What’s up? I want links to outfits like NEA.org. Problem: context. Most search systems lack the technology to deliver context aware searches. Is Microsoft search “broken”? Not really.
Second. Yahoo’s shopping search. Run this query “dell mini9 ssd from the search box here and be sure to click on “shopping”. What do you get? Zero hits. Isolated instance? Nope, for certain queries Yahoo works pretty well, but for others it’s as off base as Microsoft’s Live Search.
Third. Google. Navigate to Google.com and enter this query: “eccs”. The acronym stands for “emergency core cooling system” and Google returns only false drops. Google fails this query test.
What’s happening?
The reality is that no search system works particularly well. Search is good enough, and in my opinion, that’s the state of the art. Twitter is no better and no worse than most free search systems. Will search improve? Slowly, goose lovers, slowly.
Stephen Arnold, May 23, 2009
Comments
2 Responses to “Twitter Search a Quitter”
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Stephen,
Agree with your comments about search generally but the Twitter case is a particularly poor showing. Consider that they are operating over a single source of well formed data over which they have complete control.
Also the total size of their data since inception is not all that big. A few terabytes max. Perhaps they should consider bringing in a enterprise search vendor to help.
In my completely unqualified opinion they need to give up their “little engine that could” self image and get serious about getting big.
Joe
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