Forget MSN and Yahoo, Twitter search is the biggest threat Google has faced. Sooner or later Twitter is going to figure out that search is the way to make money but how could they improve it? What would Google do?
Relevance
Twitter search at present is just a list of status updates with the most recent at the top. This isn’t how search engines should work – finding a needle in a haystack is easy, finding the right needle in a haystack full of needles is the hard part and that’s what Google does better than anybody.
The key is to look at the content of a status update and evaluate whether it is actually relevant to the query – if I want information about the latest plane crash then seeing a status update from somebody saying “anybody got an update on xxxxxx plane crash” is useless.
RR (RetweetRank)
Google is built around PageRank and each link is a vote. Twitter has Retweets and replies – the most important status updates get retweeted and replied more than the useless ones.
A really important tweet might get hundreds of retweets and this needs to be reflected in it’s rankings.
TrustRank
Google ranks the BBC and Wikipedia top for everything whether they are right or wrong. A tweet from a twitter user with 20,000 followers should be trusted more than one from a brand new account.
Relevance needs to play a part here too – if Stephen Fry (who has loads of followers but no history of writing about SEO or conversing with people who write about SEO) writes something saying “what the hell is SEO” then his tweet shouldn’t rank for “SEO” . If somebody with less followers always covers SEO their tweets about SEO should be trusted more.
Conversation density
What’s more important, a standalone tweet about a subject or a tweet that comes as part of a wider conversation between trusted users? Twitter needs to be analysing conversation threads to see exactly how important each status update really is.
Universal search
If I write about something and include a link then Twitter should be spidering that link and seeing how many other people are talking about the page. If it’s a particularly important page then Twitter should be pulling the video or image into the main search results using the same format as Google blended search.
If Twitter doesn’t do all this then somebody will.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Try http://bit.ly/twiggle – a simple but effective search of Twitter with Google
Superb article.
Just thinking about Twitter search, do you really see Twitter as a danger to Google search? For example if I query “car insurance” into Twitter search, are the results as relevant as the Google SERPS?
If it does take off will they launch a Pay Per Click platform or do a deal with Google? I can see Google showing Twitter results on their SERPS in the future..in the “Try your search on” section.
Find me on Twitter
Twitter could get PPC ads themselves – all the newspapers would advertise on breaking queries.
More comments from Patrick AltoftA nice article
Nicely done. Also serves as a quick guidebook on Twitter significance and relevance. Thank you.
I’m glad you make the distinction of ‘relevance’ regarding your comment that the word from a Twitter user with 20,000 followers carries more weight than a newcomer, because if you take a look through the top 100 Twitter users (by popularity) on Twittercount.com, and actually follow their submissions to the service, very few are authorities on anything (some tech experts aside).
It won’t be long before that top 100 is all real-world celebrities and while I think your idea is sound, the follow count should (and will) prove largely irrelevant to authority.
I think the re-Tweet angle is closer to how things need to be. But even that’s edgy as, again, those with enormous follow-counts are often re-Tweeted even if the Tweet is redundant and/or (in many cases) old news. I’m amazed how often small/medium-sized Twitter users deliver information that is mostly ignored, and then 3-7 days later one of the big names on Twitter will provide the exact same link and it’s re-Tweeted into oblivion. It’s obvious why, of course, but it’s frustrating for the populace. What I’d like to see is Twitter following Reddit’s lead (which you kind of hint at) and if a link has been submitted X times already (not necessarily once, as nobody follows everybody), then it prompts up with a, “This has already been submitted X times today, but you can try submitting it again.” or somesuch. My gut feeling is you’d find a lot of the so-called Twitterati get that prompt again and again.
This is a topic that has been going round and round for some time and the savvy tweeters and bot makers out there are already using methods like these to get real results. Fortunately the Twitter and Twitter search APIs allow anyone to do all this with ease.
I think Google know this too. They haven’t got their heads in the sand. They, like many of us are probably waiting to see what Twitter’s next move is going to be.
I say that because Google could very easily make an addon to their services using the Twitter API that would enhance their search massively. The reason they haven’t done this yet is because Twitter, although big and very popular could potentially disappear overnight or change direction rather rapidly making any effort Google have put in completely worthless. Google could literally throw a couple of million dollars at this today and get the job done. All well and good but if Twitter decide tomorrow that they are going to do things differently, it is money wasted.
The sensible things for Twitter to do, in my opinion would be to charge search engines like Google for unlimited API access. This would enable Google to maintain their killer search and puts money in the bank for Twitter. Everyone’s happy!
Naturally Twitter would have to up their game considerably in this scenario because I can’t see Google doing business with anyone unless there is a very heavy SLA in place.
Oh and if they haven’t already thought of this, I could do with the cash if they want to cut me in.
KTHXBAI.
Nice post Patrick, best insight I’ve read about how Twitter search could/should work. RetweetRank is a great idea!
These guys are trying to develop something that incorporates sentiment/opinions within a tweet, but you can’t search on this to discover general perception of any topic yet. I’m not convinced about how well it works either, but an interesting concept nonetheless.
In the meantime, I’d say build the above and maybe they’ll acquire you like they did Summize…
Nice article. However, the problem with authority on twitter is, that twitter itself doesn’t contain/operate with enough metadata to compute good authority (for example the fact, that someone is followed by a lot of people doesn’t say much about his/her expertize in anything – take Britney Spears as an example…). You need a mashup to have more complete picture about someone’s competence. I blogged about this sometime ago – http://www.subject.cz/josef/?p=58 .
Surely that should be Twust Rank?
Yo. Your search concept would be so… sugoi! But it’s one thing to describe a feature and another thang to develop it or even get it to work. Vision, money, talent or all three could be lacking.
hannibal666
Follow me down the rocky road of good intentions…
Here is one company that is working on it … http://AskTwiR.com
Is that stupid name because they were to slow off the mark in getting http://asktwitter.com/
Gotta love those forward thinking domain squatters.
Actually only your mouth is fast… they do have asktwitter ..
I should stop typing with my mouth and use fingers like everyone else.
Fair enuf then. Not sure why they would brand themselves around a silly name when they have something that makes perfect sense.
Although… Maybe they are concerned about trademark infringement…
In my view Twitter is overrated. Try to explain the services of Twitter and Google in one sentence. There you go!
You asked for it, Rene:
Twitter is an extensible, open communications platform and Google are primarily a search provider but offer many other web based services.
Good ideas here, though I would already be glad of Twitter could simply integrate search with the Twitter Web interface. And to not have search.twitter.com go down or restrict search result to no more than 7 days all of the time.
Also, bio indexing/search should be added to their people search, currently this is provided by TweepSearch.com, but it’s heaving mightily under the load of indexing and reindexing e.g. Scoble’s 60k+ followers. One would think that Twitter flush with VC cash could provide something this basic natively.
Follow me on Twitter (link above), I follow back.
Interesting post and on a subject I’ve been thinking for a while. I put a deck together about this and it’s getting more internal traction (I work at Microsoft) than expected.
First, as for the importance of Search to Twitter. Here’s a good article on from the Silicon Valley newspaper, Mercury Sun: http://bit.ly/tpJGB
Second, I agree with your factors. The basic equation I have currently come to for TwitRank is: User Influence X User Topic Authority X Update Authority
For User Influence, the work Guy Hagen is doing with Twinfluence is interesting http://bit.ly/IdNRN
And for Update Authority, some of the work Dan Zarella has done around Retweets is good http://bit.ly/1AQ3N
I’m still working on User Topic Authority, so if anyone has some thoughts, then please let me know.
@Tweepl
Well I would put it this way:
Google: Wanna find p0rn?
Twitter: Twitter is an extensible, open communications platform.
To me Google is still way ahead.
nice post, so if google did twitter search you would also get some tweeters ranking higher through spamming, RT, hypernated names, and there would be adwords which would atleast bring in the revenue….
Check out my cartoon on this story at:
http://www.pcdisorder.com/2009/03/google-test-driving-twitter.html
This is a interesting article.I like this.but it is an imaginary thing that explain in this article.
Twitter is going to monetize search the same way Google monetized search. They are going to charge advertisers to send little DM’s to people who mention things related to their line of business. For example, I’m a furniture vendor, if someone says they need to buy furniture, I want to advertise to that person. Arguably, that person is further along in the conversion cycle than someone performing a search for “furniture” on Google. For more on “Twitter Paid Search,” see my blog entry: http://inside.nikkoshops.com/twitter-is-the-next-paid-search-venue/. Thanks.
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