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February 15, 2013 06:22 am GMT

You Think You Know What You Want Out Of Twitter Search, But Its Not What You Really Need

6941676850_846d67f527_zTwitter and search sound like two peas in a pod, but it’s actually not the marriage made in heaven that you’d think it is. When you think of search, you think of a search engine, like Google, where the world’s information is seemingly at your fingertips. You feel confident that when you Google something, you won’t miss the important information. The secret is that it’s Google’s algorithm that makes search work, not the fact that it indexes everything in the world. In fact, most people don’t get past the second page of search results, so we’re not even utilizing all of the data that Google collects. When I speak to people about Twitter search, they seem to want the same thing: “access to every tweet ever tweeted.” That sounds fine on paper, but in actuality, you really don’t want access to every tweet — just the really good ones. That’s the issue that Twitter is tackling these days, figuring out which tweets to serve up when you search for a word, phrase topic or hashtag. If you were to search for “#grammys” on Twitter, you’d find a whole lot of junk and spam and your experience wouldn’t be a very good one. Sure, we all want to know what our buddies said five years ago when they were drunk, but that’s not how Twitter search works right now. Last week, the company announced that it would be introducing “older tweets” into search results, with not much more information than that. Here’s what the team said at the time: Previously, Twitter search results displayed Tweets going back about a week. Weve developed a way to include older Tweets, so you can see content that goes beyond the more recent Tweets. Pretty vague, I’d say. But the crux of that statement is that Twitter is definitely looking backwards as far as the content that its accumulated since launching in 2006. There’s a lot of great information to be had from tweets that happened during events like the uprising in Egypt, political elections, the day that Michael Jackson died and just about every natural disaster that’s happened since Twitter launched. I sat down with Sam Luckenbill, an engineer on the Twitter search team, to discuss what the company has in mind for its search experience. Luckenbill joined Twitter after having been a Ruby on Rails consultant. When he joined the company full time

Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/z9_1jAqOZeo/

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