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Posts with tag: twitter-search | Return to BloggersBlog.com Homepage
Larry Page on Twitter Search
 Loic Le Meur says he asked Google co-founder Larry Page what he though about Twitter search. Larry Page says he was always saying that Google needed real time search. He also says that now that Twitter is being used for search people at Google know they need to compete.
"I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about realtime."
Twitter is very useful for realtime search but even more so than Google News and other news sources you tend to get the same information repeated over and over. The key will be who can provide the best filter or filters for the endless stream of current tweets and news.
Posted on May 19, 2009
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Is Twitter Search a Threat to Google?
 Chris O'Brien at the Mercury News has an article about how Twitter's search tool could ultimately be a threat to Google.
Very quietly, one of Twitter's most powerful applications has become its ability to allow people to conduct real-time searches.
In fact, the motto posted on Twitter's search page (http://search.twitter.com) says, "See what's happening - right now." And many people do exactly that. During a live event or amid breaking news, a growing number of people are turning to Twitter search to follow the conversations among its users.
How much the behavior is growing is hard to say, since Twitter is privately held and doesn't release such figures. But the company thought enough of its potential to acquire a small New York company called Summize, a group of five engineers, which had built the Twitter search technology. Summize's site was folded into Twitter last summer.
Twitter's acquisition of Summize last year was a good move and greatly improved Twitter. The search tool can be very useful to find out about current events or breaking news although there have been complaints about a lack of more advanced queries. It doesn't really seem like much of a threat to Google's main search. It seems like more of a Technorati or Google Blog Search threat. It is potentially a threat to news searchers like Google News and Yahooo News if people decide to dump those tools in favor of Twitter's search.
Posted on February 25, 2009
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Twitter Search Needs More Advanced Queries
 As Paris Lemon points out there's a bitchmeme on Techmeme right now started here by Loic Le Meur about using Twitter authority as a way to reduce the number of results in a Twitter search. Since it has been suggested it will likely soon be created by someone using the Twitter API if it hasn't already been created. Technorati uses authority on its search to show only posts from blogs that have a certain number of inbound links.
Critics of a Twitter authority search say including only Twitterers that have large numbers of followers is unfair and that it will cause people to try and obtain more followers by following more people. It would also tend to favor people who have been on Twitter longer and tend to have more followers. There are a few of other ideas being suggested as alternatives - some can be found in the comments on TechCrunch's post. They are:
Provide a way to limit search results to only tweets that have been responsed to or re-tweeted.
Allow people to search only tweets from people that they follow.
Twitter's search tool already has a few ways (see also search operators) to reduce the number of tweets in a search. You can search a specific person's tweets and you can return only tweets that contain a link. You can also limit searches to tweets by people near a specific place. You can limit the results to tweets only from certain dates. It's clear these tools aren't enough and the Twitter search engine needs more advanced filtering. The more ways available for users to search tweets the better.
Posted on December 27, 2008
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