Inside Word: How The Big Search Engines Should Rank Tweets
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The Inside Word is a weekly feature that looks at compelling industry debates and discussions unfolding on the blogs of employees at digital-media companies.
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Blogger: Hutch Carpenter
Position: Carpenter is the VP of product at Spigit, which sells social software to businesses; it has raised $14 million in funding
Blog name: I’m Not Actually A Geek
Backstory: All three major search engines have begun to feature “real-time” results from Twitter over the last several months. Microsoft’s Bing kicked things off in late October when it added a page that showcases the “hottest topics” from Twitter. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) added real-time updates from Twitter and other sources to its standard results pages last week. And Yahoo, too, added Tweets to its results pages this month for some “buzzing topics.” All three companies say they incorporate both the timeliness and the relevance of a Tweet when determining whether to feature it. But some critics have argued that the sites don’t do enough filtering.
Blog post: Carpenter, who writes frequently about Twitter on his blog, offers his own recipe for how Tweets can be incorporated more effectively.
“How should tweets be ranked in Bing and Google search results?” he asks. “I hope your answer isn’t, ‘I wouldn’t.’ Because that’s contrary to what made Google such a global powerhouse used by billions every year. And why Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is working hard to increase Bing’s market share. Google and Bing built their business by presenting search results based on the authority of web sites. This system of authority (e.g. PageRank) makes the results relevant to users. So what about running searches for Tweets? Should their presentation be utterly devoid of any authority ranking? Does it make sense to just show the latest tweet containing a given term?”
He describes at length three factors that need to be considered: How frequently someone posts on the specific subject, the popularity of a Tweeter (how many followers they have and how many lists they are on), and how often specific Tweets are retweeted and clicked on.
Post-script: I asked Carpenter for his views on the big search engines’ Twitter integrations to date. He said he was not a fan of Bing’s Twitter presentation, since users have to navigate away from the main Bing site to see it. In that sense, he said, Google—which includes its Twitter results among its standard results—“is closer to the way it’s going to be.”
As for relevancy, he said that the same query in Bing, Google, and Twitter itself generated many more results in Twitter—a sign that Google and Bing are, in fact, whittling down results in some way, though, he says, it’s not yet clear what criteria they’re using to filter.
Know of an insightful employee blog that covers digital media, entertainment or tech? Please e-mail the URL to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), so that I can include it in a future edition of the Inside Word.
Posted In: Features, Inside Word, Search, Companies, Google, Microsoft, Bing, Twitter, Yahoo
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