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Loic Le Mur calls for the ability to filter Twitter search by authority –
There were more than 7000 tweets posted during the two days of LeWeb, no way anyone can read them quickly. We need filtering and search by authority. We’re not equal on Twitter, as we’re not equal on blogs and on the web. I am not saying someone who has more followers than yourself matters more, but what he says has a tendency to spread much faster.
What we need is search by authority in Twitter Search. Technorati had nailed it years ago by allowing searches filtered by number of links the blogger had. It would be very easy for Twitter to add an authority line in their search criteria, with the number of followers so that you can search for say, only people who have more than a thousand followers and see what they say. It is not a criteria for being smart or not, but clearly a criteria for how fast something can spread.
The ability to sort by authority and freshness are two reasons why I use Technorati instead of Google Blog Search. Google only allows you to search by relevance and filter the results by date. On social search — and blog search and Twitter search are both examples of social search — authority and recency are often more important than relevance. The ideal social search engine, however, would allow you to sort the search results by relevance, authority or recency, as per your requirements.
As of now, Twitter search only allows you to search by recency, which is a serious limitation. Apart from the ability to filter or sort by authority, it also needs the ability to sort by relevance. One way to judge relevance is the number of times a tweet has been retweeted as retweets are to micoblogging what links are to blogging. Another way to judge relevance is to give priority to the searcher’s friends and friends-of-friends.
As Michael Arrington has pointed out, Twitter is unlikely to release such features themselves and there’s an opportunity for another startup to build a better Twitter search engine, like Summize.
Update: Sarah Lacy disagrees with Loic Le Mur. Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis and Sam Harrelson believe that relevance (defined by the distance in the social graph) is more important in social search that authority. I agree, but the ideal search solution should offer both.
Robert Scoble and Bob Warfield also believe that relevance (defined by popularity of the tweet) should be an important input in Twitter search. Robert Scoble suggest that the popularity of a tweet should be measured by a combination of retweets, favorites and inbound links for that tweet. I think search result clickthroughs are less relevant in Twitter search, as clickthroughs will only happen on tweets with links.
Update: Several other bloggers were (irrationally) upset with the idea, but Michael Arrington and Loic Le Mur were vindicated when Jon Wheatley hacked Twitority in less than 12 hours. Twitority does exactly what Loic le Mur had asked for. It lets you filter your Twitter search results by the number of followers. It may be difficult to factor in relevance into Twitority’s algorithm, but it certainly needs another filter: time. Apart from the any authority/ a little authority/ a lot of authority filter, it also needs a last hour/ last day/ last week/ any time filter. That shouldn’t take long… another 12 hours, perhaps?
Related posts:
- Information Overload, Media Literacy, the Internet Echo Chamber, and Journalism’s Search for Relevance
- Agencyfaqs Story on How Real Time Search Is a Game Changer for Marketers and Content Creators
- Blog-Search Shootout – Technorati vs. Google
- A New Approach To Twitter Friendship and Influence
- Why Live Search is Difficult to Monetize With Keyword Based Search Advertising
