Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Pramesh — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 08:53:29 -0000

Here's one of many sites that use Twitter's Search API that I think would be disadvantaged if search results were ranked by popularity:

www.thechoicesyoumade.ca

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Buns and Chou Chou — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 23:04:58 -0000

Oh, and authority, is not power.

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Buns and Chou Chou — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 23:04:17 -0000

Thank you Scoble, for sticking up for little people, or, ummm, rabbits like us. That's why you are smarter than the rest. People just want to game a system, or perpetuate a status quo. The net is to be organic, and information not related to power.

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Martijn — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 10:10:31 -0000

Does this option to sort results the way I prefer, lessen your Twitter experience (again, built in as an option)?
What's the fuss?

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Sachin Balagopalan — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 08:58:45 -0000

I think it’s more of a technical issue rather than a design problem … remember the scaling debacle? http://bit.ly/XCUT

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Adi — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 06:55:10 -0000

That's a pretty basic concept you've used to beat this idea with Robert. After all, Google uses popularity as part of its ranking algorithm but it hasn't resulted in you ranking for Britney Spears related searches has it. I think we have to give the folks at Twitter a modicum of common sense.

Is it really so far fetched to see Twitter apeing Google and using the number of followers, and in turn the reputation of each of those followers as 'part' of a ranking algorithm? Doesn't seem to require much creativity to find a workaround to the problem you highlighted.

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

DC Crowley — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 04:52:59 -0000

99% agree with you. IMO Technorati 'authority' does not work if you are outside the valley crowd, if it even really works there. One disagreement, I use favourites to mark tweets a lot but I am one of the few I know who do. Since it has low usage - I'm not sure how useful it is.

Great that you are blogging more again

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Laforge129 — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 04:30:55 -0000

I don't agree about it because of bots and how they will ruin twitter:
http://friendfeed.com/e/e11...

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Louis Gray — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 04:01:33 -0000

I agree that aligning # of followers does not always indicate authority. But I see little harm in the option being added to search. You know I'm a big advocate for the little guy, and I try not to let # of RSS subscribers, followers etc. measure somebody. But why not enable the Twitter search database to be very flexible and include this option? Maybe I'd use it.

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

J.D. Meier — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 22:57:36 -0000

I like the fact on Google, the network determines the authority.

There's a lot of precision though and relevancy is king. It's about the authority links for the relevant keywords.

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Gail Gardner — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 20:49:30 -0000

The gaming of followers is growing exponentially. Anyone who wishes to see it can simply record results for major Twitter users using Twinfluence and check back in a few days. The number of new users with huge numbers of followers is growing rapidly.

Just as being a celebrity is not an indication of quality, numbers of followers is not either.

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

jark — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 19:17:46 -0000

Completely agreed. Just because someone has a large number of followers does not make them an authoritative speaker on anything they write about. If twitter were to sort searches by "authority" then anyone with a lot of followers merely mentioning a single word will ultimately be displayed well ahead of the really smart people

Arrington advocating this idea does not surprise me. Loic advocating it does.

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

CrystalsQuest — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 17:20:07 -0000

Agree with you about popularity vs importance, but then again, as geeks we ALL know that lesson first hand!

Got one to add to your list:
1. Number of retweets of that tweet.
2. Number of favorites of that tweet.
3. Number of inbound links to that tweet.
4. Number of clicks on an item in Twitter search.
and
5. Number of past tweets including searched keyword
(that would help you get a few more subject matter experts)

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

John Kim — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:38:43 -0000

Robert:

A couple of notes on your post. I think the spirit of this discussion is the right one. Your suggestions are excellent but probably not enough.

Anytime you reveal how search works, it can be instantly gamed. There are many smart people in the world. I can already see some smart engineers developing a system to take advantage of your ideas. Spam is a serious full-time product problem.

Expert search products need to solve the cold start problem for people with true authority. While many on Twitter call themselves experts, the real experts may not be tweeting. When and if they do, their opinion may get lost in all the noise. For example, David Ku (VP Engineering, Yahoo! Search) is not tweeting (at least, I have not seen him) but if he did, I am not sure everyone would appreciate his brilliance, authority or expertise as it pertains to the topic of search. Something other than the volume of X or Y must be a factor and relevancy consideration. You must also be able to motivate experts to maintain their presence.

We can learn some excellent lessons from Yahoo! Answers and Naver from Korea. To support your point, the experts at Yahoo! Answers
lack serious credibility. Many of the experts respond in volume but their answers lack quality.

Twitter is sitting on a big idea. Developing a set of search algorithms
to take advantage of this opportunity should not be rushed. I hope they hire someone with serious experience to lead them in this area.

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Engago Team — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:22:00 -0000

All people are equal - equally important.
As Scobleizer proposes there are other possible metrics than the number of followers.

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Twitter_Tips — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:21:12 -0000

Filtering by follower numbers isn't anyone's be-all-end-all but providing filtering is a good idea. You know even the people who say it's a bad idea for a follower filter would test the filter regularly, and when it helped, they'd be grateful for it.

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

lyceum1776 — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:00:30 -0000

Robert Schoble,

I don't really care how they do with this authority ranking. I have no problem with belonging of the very end of the very long tail... ;) It would be great if you could have a good search engine for Twitter and FriendFeed so could find new interesting individuals.

By the way: Thanks for mentioning a supply chain expert. I will now follow @liamcasey. I worked as a purchaser between 1989 - 1997 and I am a member of a purchasing and logistics association in Sweden, so I am interested in following what is going on in this field.

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

coldbrew — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 14:47:49 -0000

Le Meur was describing 'influence' (eg. follower #s) and mislabeled it 'authority' (eg. expertise). This is simply one of the ways one should be able to filter search results. Scoble nails another, retweet #s, which can be gamed like digg #s. An approach using AI would be ideal, but currently not possible. TweetDeck is addressing this issue far better than Twhirl, or any other product at the moment.

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Eric Fortenberry — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 14:27:45 -0000

I completely agree with Scobleizer here. The number of retweets and favorites seem to be much more relevant factors to rank tweet searches.

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Christian Anderson — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 14:08:01 -0000

Loic's comment is so far off the mark, one gas to wonder if the comment was made for the purposes of whipping up contaversy. Loic has seen how many clicks he gets when he is at the center of a very public debate. The problem is, that ruins his credibility, influence and personal brand long term.

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Ben Hedrington — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 14:02:56 -0000

Robert, the "metadata" is you your favor here... I was checking out my little http://www.retweetradar.com experiment and see that the URL of this post is the most retweeted URL recently... looks like the crowd says you are on the right track here.

-Ben
http://spy.appspot.com, http://www.retweetradar.com

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Mayank Dhingra — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 13:46:22 -0000

As mentioned in my follow up post immediately after the TC post

While counting re-tweets, the re-tweets generated on original content should be counted and not on ones which are someone else's content

for ex: count if someone did RT @mayankdhingra "xyz" but not if someone did RT @mayankdhingra @scobleizer "xyz". In the latter case retweet should be counted for your account not mine

more here http://mayank.name/blog/200...

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Batman — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 13:37:58 -0000

Damn, you, Scobe!!! You stole my next article!!! Back to the Tablet for me, I guess.

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

Gillian Brouse — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 13:37:57 -0000

I like your take on this. Still... retweets, which are important, are at least partly a function of number of followers. (Some really smart tweets won't get retweeted because they they are comments from someone who only has a couple hundred instead of several thousand followers.) Still, it is a better measure than authority on its own.

Re: Mike and Loic are wrong about Twitter search

JustinSMV — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 13:36:55 -0000

"popularity on Twitter isn’t a good way to measure whether a Tweet is any good or not."

Given but numbers are measurable results and people will always strive on numbers, whether it is to measure exposure or success. I say have the best of both worlds have great followers and have great content, can't beat that.