• 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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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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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’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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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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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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It doesn’t seem to work for all keywords, but on certain occasions Twitter has started ranking certain high-profile users above the normal reverse-chronological results that are normally generated.

For example, here is a search for Twitter:

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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. This is a beta project, but an important first step to surface the most popular tweets for users searching Twitter.

You can expect many improvements as we tune and tweak our algorithms, but we want to give everyone a heads up so we can go over the implications for those consuming the search API.

It’s unclear how exactly they are going to define what it is that classes a tweet as popular. People rarely click on individual tweets, so that metric isn’t going to work at all. My guess is it’s likely to be based heavily on retweets, perhaps held up against network size, which means that Justin Bieber is going to be your authority on everything.

For everybody’s sake, let’s hope they’re also working on an algorithm to counter that, too.

(Hat tip to Mashable.)

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(Read more at 140char.com.)

Ads will be delivered via searches on Twitter, and come packaged in 140 characters or less, which might present a dilemma for businesses to get their message across. That said, we’ve all had a lot of practice at selling tweets, so advertisers should be at least semi-prepared.

(Imagine how much better this would all be if Twitter searches came with TweetRank? Perhaps the users with the most clout could be linked up to the advertising model and rewarded accordingly.)

This is a bit of a no-brainer for Twitter. I’ve often speculated on the plausibility of an Adwords-style system on the network (using Spotify as a case study) and the most surprising part is that it’s taken this long to implement (and still won’t hit the platform for a few months yet).

It’s really too early to speculate about the consequences of all of this without more information, but I do have one question: will the option to advertise be open to everybody, like it is with Google’s Adsense program, or is Twitter going to continue the form it has shown with the suggested user list and verified users, and only offer this service to their personal favourites?

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I wonder if Twitter needs to embrace a variation of Google’s PageRank system – let’s call it TweetRank – and begin to score and rate individual accounts according to the ways in which they behave, handing out penalties to users who show a blatant and repeated disregard for the rules.

Cloaking

Cloaking is the practice of deception by displaying different content to search engines than that which is displayed to users. There is a frighteningly large number of Twitter users who act very above board and ‘normal’ in the public side of the network, while functioning as little more than mass-marketers and spammers in the private world of direct messaging. Direct messages are private, and none of us like the idea of ‘the man’ reading our inbox, but a warning system could work well here, where users flag accounts for duplicitous behaviour.

Automated Queries

Google doesn’t like it when websites bombard them with automated queries, as it wastes resources and bogs down server time. Automated messages on Twitter – which includes direct messaging and updates from external services (including things like Foursquare) – are equally undesirable. Often many users are unaware that they’re sending out automated messages, or that their accounts have been exploited in some way, because they don’t regularly check their connections settings.

Irrelevant Keyword Use

Some users include words in their bios that are clearly there simply to generate results from searches. Common examples are SEO, make money at home and profit. In many cases these accounts are nothing more than spam feeds that heavily-promote affiliate schemes and the like.

Paid Links

Advertising on Twitter is a hot potato. From Twitter’s perspective, it’s an inevitability. But what about users that get paid to link to external sites? Advertising for publishers is very much part of the internet’s business model, but if these paid links go out to scams or make claims that are unproven or entirely false, then the user should take responsibility and be marked down accordingly.

URL Redirection

It’s a common scam to hide bad links within good ones. I’ve seen some users hide an affiliate or malicious link between several layers of bitlys and TinyURLs. It is my personal opinion that any user that links to a malicious website or known scam should be heavily punished by Twitter, perhaps adopting a ‘three strikes’ rule to avoid accidental retweeting or exploits.

Linking To Known Spammers

This is perhaps the most important item on the list. Despite their best efforts, Twitter continues to have major problems with spam. This issue is made significantly worse by people who blindly auto-follow anybody who follows them, because it legitimises the spam account, both in terms of improving their ratio and showing an ‘A-list name’ in their network. Twitter needs to take greater responsibility in ridding the network of obvious spam accounts, but the users need to step up, too, and I propose that any user who follows too many spammers should be punished.

(This would also allow the implementation of a reward system that hands out TweetRank bonuses to users who are followed by other highly-ranked individuals, providing a greater indication of clout.)

What Kind Of Punishment?

Users who breach some or all of the rules above are penalised, with a lowering overall score reflecting how highly you place on Twitter search. Score a ten, and you show up for all relevant queries, right at the top of the list.

Score a zero, and you don’t show up at all. Ever.

This could make Twitter search an incredibly powerful and reliable system, as results could then be measured by clout and reputation, as well as ridding the mechanism of the bulk of spam and scammy or malicious links. Twitter could add a little relevance option to the search results that re-ranked the output according to status, or you could view the data reverse-chronologically, as we do now.

Perhaps – and this is controversial – all new users to Twitter should have to ‘earn’ their place on the search results, much like all new websites have to earn their spot at the top of Google. Your TweetRank rises and falls with your behaviour. Some people won’t care too much about where they place in Twitter’s search results, but for businesses, brands and influencers it’s incredibly important. And as the network expands, the value of ranking well on Twitter search will rise exponentially.

Moreover, accounts that start spamming right out of the gates will be hidden from everybody else, and likely will never earn a spot within search.

Once users are ranked, they can easily be tagged and categorised, and finding the top 100 experts on any given subject would be available to you at the click of a button or two.

Rewarding and penalising users is potentially a risky endeavour and, much like Google, Twitter would need to keep revising and revamping the algorithm that they would use for any TweetRank system. An independent ombudsman could be created to ensure fairness, and perhaps the opinion of the Twitter collective could be a factor in a user’s score. There would inevitability be a teething period, and a strong likelihood of cries of foul play and favouritism from some quarters, but the benefits to the network as a whole should not be underestimated.

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When you login to Twitter.com, you’ll be given the opportunity to set the trending topics to your choice of 22 different locations.

Immediately, of course, you see the problem here – while Twitter has stated that they’re working on adding new locations, chances are that most people who use the service will find that Local Trends is anything but for them at this moment in time.

Indeed, the nearest ‘local’ to me would be London. And, being absolutely frank, being able to quickly see what’s trending on Twitter within London isn’t of much more benefit to me than being able to quickly see what’s trending on Twitter everywhere.

Moreover, the differences between what is trending around the world, in the United Kingdom and within London aren’t as staggeringly different (or interesting) as you might expect.

As you can see, the UK are clearly more interested in the tennis at the Australian Open than the rest of the world, and you would expect a UK-specific event such as Holocaust Memorial Day to only be trending within these shores.

And it amuses me that Londoners seem to favour the iPad as the name of choice for Apple’s soon-to-be-announced touchpad device, while everybody else is all about the (God-awful) iSlate.

Otherwise, it’s all about the glory of #nowthatsghetto.

Here’s the thing: being able to see trending topics in any given location is always going to be less useful to me than the facility to be able to set whatever filters and parameters I like from scratch.

For example, the option to simply search within the tweets of those people in my immediate network on Twitter would be something of significantly higher value. Using this method one could quickly and easily poll trends and opinion from those whose judgement we already trust. (And if not, why exactly are you following them?)

And being able to remove trending topics that are of no interest with the touch of a button would also improve the output dramatically. I accept that hashtag memes are popular with many, but they’re of absolutely no interest to me whatsoever. I’d rather not see them, to be honest, if only because they’re taking up space that might be better used for something that’s actually of value.

As it is – and I dare say this would be the case if Twitter ever gets round to providing local trends for my home town – aside from the novelty value, seeing what is trending in any one location is never going to be of much benefit. If something big happens in London and is only trending in London, that’s really only of use to Londoners. And even that’s a stretch, as if it’s big enough to be trending, it’s likely already in the greater consciousness, as that’s why it’s trending.

(Although how or why Danny Dyer’s television show about UFOs has generated such a level of interest is anybody’s guess.)

And that’s the rub in a nutshell: the problem with trending topics is that they are too general. This is why they’re trending, of course, because lots of people are talking about them, but while you can occasionally get surprised by something on a trending topic, when it’s still trending a week later it’s little more than an irritant. Especially when the reason why it’s trending is wrong.

If we could shape this output the value would increase exponentially. And it would be nice to see outside just the top ten, too – after all, chances are that there are many worthy things of interest in the long tail between numbers eleven and infinity, but the bulk of these never get a look in simply because once a trending topic is inside the top ten it automatically gets a lot more attention. In this way, it works a bit like a music, movie or book chart. The real quality is often just outside the very top, going unnoticed by the general populace.

It’s good to see Twitter rolling out all these new features of late but I do wish they’d adopt a sense of priority. We still have major problems with Twitter search, a block function that doesn’t work, a very ropey direct message system and never-ending problems with spammers and bots.

Perhaps if and when these things begin trending we might start to see some solutions. Of course, if you’ve set your Local Trends to the wrong location, chances are you won’t even notice.

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I want to be able to search the tweets of my network. And just my network.

I’m following these folks for a reason. It would be nice to be able to tap into specifically what they think about my question or problem. Being able to see what Twitter’s 15-20 million users think about x is fantastic, but it’s not always what I need or want.

One checkbox. You can leave everything else the same. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

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Of particular relevance:

1. Your tweets aren’t recent: We only index tweets for about 6 days. If your most recent tweet is older than that, please tweet again and check.

2. Your account is private: Private or “protected” accounts do not appear in search. Learn more about protected accounts here.

3. Your account is new, or you recently changed your username: It can take a few days for new and updated accounts to be indexed by search.

4. Your email is bouncing: If you log in and see a big red warning when you’re at twitter.com that says your email address is having delivery issues, please take the steps to fix it! We want to show you in search, but we need you to fix your email first.

5. You are being filtered out of search due to a quality issue: In order to provide the best search experience for users, Twitter automatically filters search results for quality. This Search Quality help page has information why accounts are filtered from search

6. You are missing because of current resource constraints: Right now, some users may not be seeing their Tweets because of resource constraints. This is more likely affecting you if you’re a new user (with an account less than a couple of weeks old). Our search engineers are working on this known issue, and your Tweets should start showing up in search soon!

If none of this seems very helpful then you’ll need to file a support ticket at this page: http://bit.ly/twicket.

I’ve left my original article intact as below. Please note that it was written in June 2009.

###

For five days now, Twitter’s search has been broken. In fact, it’s actually been acting strangely for a lot longer than this – several weeks  - but one particular aspect is relatively new. The problem is, this part has not been broken for everybody, so it hasn’t received as much attention as it probably should.

But it is broken for me. How? The ‘from:’ query in Twitter’s search feature, which lets you see all the posts from a given user, is showing that I last tweeted five days ago.

Now, we know that’s not true, as since that time I’ve submitted about twelve gazillion new tweets.

You can check this for yourself here. See what I mean? I laugh in the face of ‘realtime’.

This Is Just The Beginning

If it was just me being affected by this, I’d think myself either mad, or in the midst of some hideous conspiracy. But I’ve heard it from other people too, including my friend Zagrrl, who also, according to Twitter, hasn’t submitted anything in five days. This is also not true, as you can quickly gauge by looking at her timeline. It gets worse – some of my other contacts haven’t tweeted at all – actually, they have.

The reason why this matters is that many external clients depend on the from: search function to deliver replies to followers. As you may know, I use Seesmic Desktop, and within it I run a search for mentions of my username alongside my standard replies pane. Each time @Zagrrl has replied to me of late, it has not showed up in search. This is the case also for others in my network who have been impacted by this defect.

The catch, as I said above, is from my studies I see that few of the big names on Twitter have been impacted by this issue, or at least are unaware that they have, and this is why I think it is going largely unreported. The thing is, we all have, to a greater or lesser extent – from: seems to be completely ignoring my tweets for the past few days, but it’s ignoring ALL tweets from a week or more ago for everybody on the network. Even Oprah, who according to Twitter has tweeted only once.

It’s not just from:, either – a lot of Twitter’s search functionality is down. In fact, right now, you cannot search back further than 7-10 days (depending on the user) for anything on Twitter. As more than one wag has pointed out, it’s a good thing Twitter is pushing its ‘real-time search’, as right now that’s your only option.

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This year, we’ve already had a very unfavourable reaction to Twitter’s decision to remove the facility for users to see all replies; their response to this was equally absurd, to a point where I started to wonder if they have been just winging it all along.

At the moment, the network is struggling with several small bugs, each of which is relatively minor but collectively they’re representative of something more significant.

1. Everybody Is Posting ‘Via Web’

I use Seesmic Desktop. Lots of other folks use TweetDeck, Tweetie, Dabr, Twitroid and all manner of external clients to access the network, but not no more, at least, if Twitter is to be believed, as everybody is currently posting via the web.

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And every so often, somebody will ask me about a tweet I published a while ago; typically it will be something I submitted earlier that day, but it might be a week ago, or even longer. That’s a lot of tweets.

This was the tweet we were looking for. I knew I wrote it, they knew I wrote it, and I desperately wanted to be able to find it and re-share that great content. If you tweet as much as I do, it can take hours to go back through your timeline to try and find a single submission. Forgot the haystack; this is like a needle in a stack full of needles.

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