Twitter To Rank Search Results By Popularity

According to Twitter Developer Advocate Taylor Singletary, Twitter will begin to order search results according to how popular each tweet is, rather than how recent the tweet is. Singletary says, “This is a beta project, but an important first step to surface the most popular tweets for users searching Twitter” in a message to the Developer group.

This particular update was mostly aimed at alerting the developers to upcoming changes to the search API, but the implications here are pretty deep. I can see this becoming an annoyance from a user perspective because it would go counter to what I would expect to see. Twitter is a realtime medium and I expect to see my search results in the same way.

Another issue that arises is how, exactly, we go about measuring popularity. There was a huge dust-up not so long ago where bloggers tried to figure out what influence really is and how to measure it. Is it your number of followers? Your reach? The number of retweets you cause? There are many variables in the mix here and, if Twitter doesn’t choose to take most of them into account, this could be disastrous for Twitter search.

If we think of this in terms of how Google search works, it makes it a little more clear. Google has a standard algorithm which allows it to rank search results. It’s not a system that you can necessarily game without the cooperation of many people. Google’s algorithm is detailed, specific, an has been tweaked for years now.

In the case of Twitter, there is no way to tell who is an authority. Any spammer could accumulate 100′s of thousands of followers in a day or so. Any developer worth his salt could create Twitter bots to accumulate followers and produce retweets. Measuring actual user engagement is difficult because you can’t tell who is talking to each other as opposed to who is talking at each other.

This would also go against the realtime nature the web is moving towards. If I search for a topic, I want the most recent updates on that topic not simply the most “popular.” Of course, we don’t yet know the details of how this will be implemented. Hopefully, there will be options in place to switch between the types of results we want to see.

About the Author
Rahsheen has been a certified geek since before it was the thing to do. He started programming and tinkering in the 4th grade. Now, Rahsheen mostly writes on various sites about technology trends in social media and mobile. . He is also a musician, singer, rapper, writer, and producer. @rahsheen - +Rahsheen Porter - coachrah.com
See all posts by rahsheen.