Twitter to Search, Report 'Popular' Tweets First
Twitter is developing a beta product that will return the most "popular" tweets first when a user searches for a term, rather than the most recent tweets. Facebook also quietly alerted developers this week that it, too, would give popular pages weight in its search results.
Earlier this week, Facebook also quietly alerted developers that it, too, would start to give weight within its search algorithm to popular pages. To date, however, neither Twitter nor Facebook has formally defined what "popular" will be in this context.
Twitter's plans were disclosed in a Google Groups post by Taylor Singletary, a developer advocate for Twitter. The post was first reported on by Mashable.
"The Search team is working on a beta project that returns the most popular tweets for a query, rather than only the most recent tweets," Singletary wrote. "This is a beta project, but an important first step to surface the most popular tweets for users searching Twitter."
Users will apparently have the option of searching exclusively for "popular" or "recent" tweets, but it appears that Twitter is at least considering making the "popular" attribute the default configuration for "client-side" versions of Twitter.
Social search has evolved into something of a hot topic of late, with Google implementing a Social Search feature that can return results from sources linked to you by social connections. Google and Microsoft's Bing, as well as Yahoo, have also implemented social features of their own. Withoutn a definition of how Twitter plans to implement the new feature, however, it's unclear how developers will be able to implement the new metadata, or whether they will want to. Social media experts may also have to adjust their own strategies, although Singletary also said that that the "popularity" attribute can also be turned off.
"For those using client side search widgets, by default the first request might include popular results," Singletary wrote. "If you want to display these you can use the result_type attribute to visually differentiate them. If you don't want to display these you can always just pass the 'result_type' parameter with a value of 'recent' along with your request and they'll never be included."
"If a search query has any popular results, those will be returned at the top, even if they are older than the other results," Singletary added.
Neither Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, or Evan Williams, the chief executive of Twitter, has posted any updates in their Twitter feeds commenting on the post.
Singletary promised to deliver updates as Twitter moved closer to the release date.
Facebook, for its part, posted the update in its developer blog. Facebook's search algorithm has weighted a user's connection to a particular page or application, but now appears to give more weight to just how popular it is.
"If an application or Page is popular, it's likely to appear in search results, even if a user is distantly connected to it," Pete Bratach, a Facebook developer relations employee, wrote in the blog.
Facebook's search box will also "surface" second-degree connections, including friends of friends as well as Pages, applications, or other objects friends are connected to. "If a user starts typing in a name of an application that a friend has started using, it's likely to appear at the top of the typeahead results," Bratach wrote.
Editor's Note:This story was updated at 12:07 PM PT with details of Facebook's search.