Twitter Search - AllTwitter

Finally! Old Tweets Now Show Up In Search Results On Twitter

Shea Bennett — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 06:00:10 +0000

Twitter has announced a big and important change to its search functionality, and it’s an upgrade that pretty much everybody who has been active on Twitter for more than a week has been crying out for.

And here it is: older tweets now show up in search results on Twitter.

I repeat: older tweets now show up in search results on Twitter.

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Proactive Customer Service Made Simple: Conversocial

Mary C. Long — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 16:00:05 +0000

If your company exists and has customers, it should be monitoring social media – not only for complaints, but for leads as well.

Smart businesses know that keeping a customer makes MUCH more sense than finding a new customer to replace the one you lost. And they also know that while happy customers tell their friends about you and refer new business, unhappy customers tell the WORLD and can destroy you.

If making sense of the noise on Twitter gives your CEO heart palpitations, we have a service that will help you organize customer feedback and save that executive a trip to the ER.

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Can Twitter Predict Oscar Winners Using This Advanced Sentiment Analysis Tracker?

Mary C. Long — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 14:00:44 +0000

We mentioned last year that although social media can predict many things, it can’t predict the outcome of an event when the people polled have no influence whatsoever. So, no – Twitter can’t predict who will win, but it can tell us who should win.

And this sentiment analysis tracker from Topsy is a bit different from others that have come before it, so it’s worth a look regardless.

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Twitter Slammed For Low-Paid ‘Human Data Analysts’ – But Are Critics MisInformed?

Mary C. Long — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 18:12:23 +0000

Have you heard about how Twitter search works? They employee real-live people to analyze, categorize and just overall make sense of tweet data. And the folks who perform this “human data analysis” are found on a site called Mechanical Turk.

According to some sources, these workers MUST be low paid – and correspondingly, exploited somehow. But we think these critics may be misinformed.

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A Behind-The-Scenes Look At How Twitter Search Works

Allison Stadd — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 12:00:30 +0000

Ever wondered how news breaks on Twitter?

When an event happens, and people instantly come to Twitter to search for the event, how do Twitter systems learn what the queries mean without any context, and collect them as a trend, before the search spike is gone?

Twitter’s official Engineering blog just released an in-depth look at how Twitter search works.

The results are pretty impressive – and enlightening.

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Library Of Congress Has Every Tweet, But No Way To Search Them

Mary C. Long — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 19:00:13 +0000

You know that even if you delete that ill-advised tweet right away, once posted online it’s there forever, right? No, really – it is. And the Library of Congress has it; they have EVERY public tweet sent since 2006.

But don’t worry, no one will be able to take advantage of your social missteps just yet – the database is not searchable. So the likelihood that a researcher will find (and use) your tweets to illustrate humanity’s depravity has been postponed – for now.

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Twitter Gets Googlish With Search Results

Mary C. Long — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 17:22:22 +0000

In a move reminiscent of Google’s ‘Search Plus Your World,’ Twitter announced today that its now offering ‘People you follow’ search results.

Prepare to be underwhelmed.
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TAG Challenge Proves Too Challenging, But There’s Still A Winner

Mary C. Long — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 18:45:52 +0000

Remember that social gaming competition we told you about – the Tag Challenge – where you could win $5,000 for catching five fictional jewel thieves? Well, it took place on March 31st and no one won – not entirely. There was a partial winner though, so let’s take a look at them!
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Dataminr Granted Full Access To Twitter Firehose

Mary C. Long — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:45:22 +0000

Twitter has granted full access to its firehose to the social media data mining company rumored to have predicted the death of Osama Bin Laden. The company, Dataminr, plans to use the public tweets “to create actionable signals for enterprise clients.” Wow.
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Check Out The All-New Twitter Search

Shea Bennett — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 06:00:17 +0000

In the past I’ve written many articles about the sheer magnificence that is Twitter’s search functionality, which easily allows you to:

Twitter yourself (or your brand or products)
Track customer sentiment
Guarantee you don’t miss any replies or mentions

Plus a bazillion other things. Despite this, search.twitter.com, the ‘other’ official Twitter web presence, has been all but ignored by users (except when it becomes a problem). Mostly because Twitter ignores it. And when people do use it, it’s typically via the search bar at the top of the screen on Twitter.com.

That’s fine – it’s convenient, and far more likely to be seen by users. I have long speculated if Twitter was going to phase out search.twitter.com, and now it seems that they have. Because now when you load up that URL you’ll re-routed to http://twitter.com/#!/search-home, which is the new-look Twitter search.

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Twitter Search: Now 3 Times Faster

Shea Bennett — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 06:39:42 +0000

Last week Twitter announced changes to the search functionality on Twitter.com, adding some advanced elements that expanded the results to include user profiles.

Over on the official engineering blog, Twitter’s search engineer Krishna Gade has written about how modifications to Twitter’s search engine (which began in the Spring of 2010) led to the company replacing their Ruby-on-Rails front-end with a new Java server, codenamed Blender.

End result? Twitter search is now three times faster.

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Hey @Twitter – If You Continue To Ignore Search.Twitter.Com, So Will Everybody Else

Shea Bennett — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 07:29:43 +0000

Over on the official blog, Twitter communications/PR associate Carolyn Penner (@cpen, who Twitter snatched away from Google last March) writes about improvements that have been made to Twitter’s search functionality.

We’ve made it easier to find and follow Twitter accounts based on your interests. When you search for a topic, you can now discover accounts that are relevant to that particular subject. (Previously, you would have seen accounts that have the specific term in their name or username. ) Just click on the “people” section of the search results page or search from the “Who to follow” page.

This new approach helps you find the Twitter users that will best help you follow your interests. For example, if you’re interested in hip hop, chances are that you’d like to follow hip hop artists. Searching for “hip hop” now surfaces accounts like @commonand @questlove. (Previously, we typically showed accounts that have “hip hop” in the name.)

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Twitter Yourself

Shea Bennett — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 08:30:02 +0000

Twitters mentions folder captures any use of your @username and delivers accordingly. This is obviously very convenient, but quite a basic feature.

Twitter’s powerful search feature takes this quite a few steps further and allows you to manipulate all the data across Twitter in a variety of ways.

You’ll find it at search.twitter.com, and a version of this tool comes built into nearly all Twitter clients. The advanced search is really where you want to be, but by learning some of the functionality and search operators you can quickly perform complex searches any time a Twitter search box appears.

For example, while the mentions folder kindly informs us of any reference to our username on Twitter, it doesn’t help if somebody is talking about our real name, or our brand, or even a competitor. That’s valuable information, and with a few clicks you can set up a search function that will keep track of this for you every minute of every day of the week.

How To Use Twitter Search

1. First, visit search.twitter.com, or bring up the search window in your favourite Twitter client.

2. In the input box, enter the following:

"firstname lastname" OR "company name" OR "competitor name"

For example, it could be:

"Larry Page" OR "Google" OR "Bing"

3. Click on the submit button, and away you go.

Now, it’s worth noting that the example query I used above is going to generate tens of thousands of results, and update pretty much constantly, as it’s Google. Your mileage will vary considerably. If you’re a small business or very new to the world of social media you may not see any initial results at all.

(Tip: You can test to see if the search is working by referencing the parameters in one of your own tweets, or ask a colleague to do this.)

The use of the search operator OR in this query means that Twitter will only return tweets that contain one or more of these terms, but they don’t all have to be there. If you want to see results where all of these pieces of information was contained in one tweet, simply remove all uses of OR. Search words placed in quotes mean that the exact phrase must be in the tweet and not just the words (perhaps mentioned separately). So, “Larry Page” is different to Larry Page.

You can also check on tweets that are being sent to people by searching for to:username (don’t use the @ symbol – for example, to:google), remove uses of a given word (i.e., steve -jobs) and even return positive or negative tweets by including emoticons.

Find the complete list of Twitter’s search operators here.

Bookmark this page. Play with it, memorise it, and learn from it. Most Twitter clients allow to run multiple search windows, so the opportunities are limitless. And the results will be very different to the information you find on Google, or any other search engine, as it’s far more immediate and emotive. You can reach out to disgruntled customers (your own and competitors), closely monitor the public reaction to product news and promotions, and a million other things.

It’s powerful stuff. Seize the advantage.

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Perfect Tweets, The Twitter Below, Road House, TweetRank & Malcolm Gladwell (Best Of Twittercism 2010)

Shea Bennett — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 10:34:04 +0000

When I first started writing this article I had originally planned to list my ten favourite articles on Twittercism in 2010. As I started to put the post together I found that ten wasn’t enough. I know this statement has ‘monster ego’ written all over it, and to some extent that’s 100 per cent accurate, but if you’re a fellow blogger or a writer then you’ll know how it feels when you’re asked to edit or be selective about your own content, even if it’s an instruction from yourself. It’s hard.

Yes, I wrote all of these pieces. But they feel like my babies.

So, I compromised, and kept in everything I thought was pretty good, and separated all the posts into categories.

Get Better At Twitter
The Business Of Twitter
Twitter Etiquette
Your Twitter Identity
Followers & Following
Twitter Improvements (aka, Whinging & Moaning)
Twitter Security
Twitter Clients
Opinion (And Everything Else)

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Official: Links Shared And Retweeted On Twitter Positively Impact SEO Rankings On Google And Bing

Shea Bennett — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 11:48:28 +0000

Thanks to some excellent research by Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan), this is now official – links shared on both Twitter and Facebook have an effect on the SEO rankings of that site. Retweets, too.

Sullivan pitched six questions to Google and Bing. I’ve picked out the highlights for you below:

If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it?

Bing: We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.

Google: Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article [NOTE: see the end of this article for more about that].

Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,” if you will, who they are?

Bing: Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are. (For example, query for Danny Sullivan)

Google: Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know who anyone is in real life.

Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who tweets it?

Bing: Yes.

Google: Yes we do use this as a signal, especially in the “Top links” section [of Google Realtime Search]. Author authority is independent of PageRank, but it is currently only used in limited situations in ordinary web search.

Sullivan concludes that:

In the end, it’s clear that Twitter data especially plays a role in web search, these days. Who you are is being understood. Are you a trusted authority or not? If there’s PageRank for pages, both search engines have a form of TwitterRank for people.

Meanwhile, retweets server as a new form a link building. Get your page mentioned in tweets by authoritative people, and that can help your ranking in regular search results, to a degree.

The article is worth a few minutes of your time, as is the follow-up piece on SEOmoz.

(Source: Search Engine Land, SEOmoz.)

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