Google Twitter Search

One of the most powerful feature offered by Twitter is the ability to search its stream for specific keywords so that you can keep track of people mentioning your product or other subjects you are interested in.

The way Twitter performs such searches is very simple: it basically shows you all the occurences of your search phrase ordered according to when they appeared, with the last ones on top.

Think of this: what if Google provided search results using the same, simple criteria? The result would be almost useless, that is likely not relevant.

All that said, wouldn’t it be great if Twitter started providing an “intelligent” search showing results according to more sophisticated algorithms? For example, each tweet could get a score depending on multiple parameters: number of retweets (direct or indirect), number of followers, followers/friends ratio, activity on Twitter, level of interaction with other users and so on.

It’s pretty clear that the search results could have much more sense with the approach described above in most cases, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s better. For example, if you want to interact with people who are discussing a specific subject, it’s usually more useful to reply to people whose tweets are recent than “very relevant” tweets but one month old.

In any case, there are many situation where an intelligent search makes more sense, in particular when a link is part of the tweet. An example? Think of howtos. If you are looking for a way to perform some specific operation (let’s say configure a mobile phone…), a step by step guide highlighted by a high ranked twitterer is probably more useful and it’s worth a look first.

An interesting perspective is offered by Erick Schonfeld at Techcrunch:

Why can’t Google simply index Twitter? It does, but its search results give more weight to links than to time. It could create a new search product along the lines of Blog Search or News search that is geared more towards Micro-messaging services such as Twitter, FriendFeed, and the rest. But what it really needs to go beyond simply indexing Twitter after the fact. IVP partner, and Twitter investor, Todd Chaffee, suggests:

If they were really smart they could partner with Twitter and make Twitter their real-time feed.

What do you think?  Should a Google-Twitter agreement (or acquisition?) be a big deal? I definitely look at it as a very positive development for any  internet user, despite Google already made a wrong move with the acquisition of Jaiku and certainly with, originally, other aims.

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Tagged as: Google, Jaiku, luca filigheddu, Twitter