Twitority Claims Better Twitter Search Results
Twitority is a new alternative to Twitters own search engine, promising better search results than those achieved using Twitters methodology.
Over the weekend after Christmas, Seemic CEO Loic Le Meur put up a blog post saying Twitter's search engine is insufficiently discriminating. If you're looking for the best Twitter posts on a topic, he says, you want results from the most authoritative people to be ranked higher than Tweets from the rabble. Le Meur proposed a search engine that ranked Twitter posts based in part on the number of followers the poster had. He equated this, roughly, with the influence of the poster and thus the importance of the post. And then Jon Wheatly went and built it.
To illustrate the differences here are examples of results from both sites of a search for Windows 7 beta:
As you can see, the results from the Twitter search are ranked by recent tweets and the Twitority results are ranked by most followers. The Twitority method is not neccessarily better. A good example would be a search for the latest news on a particular event. In this case you would definitely want to view the latest tweets as opposed to the results of those with the most followers.
To really provide the most accurate and timely results a huge investment would be needed to develop an algorithm akin to what Google or Yahoo uses. This would be a considerable undertaking and as of yet it does not seem to be Twitters ultimate goal in their search functionality.
The creation of Twitority does provide the end user with another option for obtaining search results from Twitter and a little competition never hurts.
Over the weekend after Christmas, Seemic CEO Loic Le Meur put up a blog post saying Twitter's search engine is insufficiently discriminating. If you're looking for the best Twitter posts on a topic, he says, you want results from the most authoritative people to be ranked higher than Tweets from the rabble. Le Meur proposed a search engine that ranked Twitter posts based in part on the number of followers the poster had. He equated this, roughly, with the influence of the poster and thus the importance of the post. And then Jon Wheatly went and built it.
To illustrate the differences here are examples of results from both sites of a search for Windows 7 beta:
As you can see, the results from the Twitter search are ranked by recent tweets and the Twitority results are ranked by most followers. The Twitority method is not neccessarily better. A good example would be a search for the latest news on a particular event. In this case you would definitely want to view the latest tweets as opposed to the results of those with the most followers.
To really provide the most accurate and timely results a huge investment would be needed to develop an algorithm akin to what Google or Yahoo uses. This would be a considerable undertaking and as of yet it does not seem to be Twitters ultimate goal in their search functionality.
The creation of Twitority does provide the end user with another option for obtaining search results from Twitter and a little competition never hurts.
