Twitter Search Gets Smarter

Jun 3, 2011 - 8:13 am 0 by
Filed Under Social Search

Twitter LogoTwitter announced they have improved Twitter Search by adding relevancy and personalization to the search results.

Twitter said, "Not only will it deliver more relevant Tweets when you search for something or click on a trending topic, but it will also show you related photos and videos, right there on the results page."

If you look at the Twitter Engineering Blog you can learn a bit more about what this means.

In our new search experience, we show search results that are most relevant to a particular user. So search results are personalized, and we filter out the Tweets that do not resonate with other users.

To support relevance filtering and personalization, we needed three types of signals:

(1) Static signals, added at indexing time
(2) Resonance signals, dynamically updated over time
(3) Information about the searcher, provided at search time

There is a lot more detail on how this works at the engineering blog. But let me show you the differences in the results:

Here is the default search view, which sorts Twitter search results by "top" results. Take notice that there are huge gabs in the timeline as to minutes between tweets. Clearly, Twitter is filtering out results here:

click for full size

If you look deeper, you will see that you can click "top" and change it to "all." It will then show a timeline of all tweets that have query word in them. See the difference?

click for full size

How about personalization? Well, check out me logged in versus not logged in:

Logged In:

click for full size

Logged Out:

click for full size

See, my tweet didn't seem relevant if I am not logged in.

Here is a video demo from Twitter on this new release:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

 

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