Twitter Loves Google Again and for Now
February 5, 2015
I have been tracking Twitter search for a while. There are good solutions, but these require some heavy lifting. The public services are hit and miss. Have you poked into the innards of TweetTunnel?
I read “Twitter Strikes Search Deal with Google to Surface Tweets.” Note that this link may require you to pay for access or the link has gone dead. According to the news story:
The deal means the 140-character messages written by Twitter’s 284 million users could be featured faster and more prominently by the search engine. The hope is that greater placement in Google’s search results could drive more traffic to Twitter, which could one day sell advertising to these visitors when they come to the site, or more important, entice them to sign up for the service.
Twitter wants to monetize its content. Google wants to sell ads.
The only hitch in the git along is that individual tweets are often less useful than processing of tweets by a person, a tag, or some other index point. A query for a tweet can be darned misleading. Consider running a query for a tweet on the Twitter search engine. Enter the term “thunderstone”. What do you get? Games. What about the search vendor Thunderstone. Impossible to find, right?
For full utility from Twitter, one may want to license the Twitter stream from an authorized vendor. Then pump the content into a next generation information access system. Useful outputs result for many concepts.
For more about NGIA systems and processing large flows of real time information, see CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access. Reading an individual tweet is often less informative than examining subsets of tweets.
Stephen E Arnold, February 5, 2015
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