Comments on: Twitter shows when we tweet and explains why its search sucks

By: Derrick Harris

Derrick Harris — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 22:58:26 +0000

Gilad,
Thanks for the comment and for the research, which is really quite interesting. While the headline is a bit provocative, I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that many users aren’t too fond of Twitter’s search feature. I think this research (and, I hope, my post) explain one reason why that that is, and I have no doubt Twitter is always striving to make search better.

By: Gilad Mishne

Gilad Mishne — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 22:22:22 +0000

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate one particular challenge of searching Tweets, and how we at Twitter are investing substantially in innovative solutions. For example, we make significant usage of social and interest interactions with tweets as part of our ranking, and personalize each search; the unique data we have access to allows us to perform well even where traditional models such as tf-idf fail.

Millions of Twitter users use our search product every day, with a high rate of returning visits and interactions on the search results, and we are hard at work to make their experience better every day.

By: Frank Speiser

Frank Speiser — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 21:39:59 +0000

This actually makes perfect sense, and Lin is correct in his research. For instance, you already know quite a bit about what people are interested in based on selection bias and what accounts they tend to follow. That tells you what they’re likely to “mean” and what they prefer to see.

The results, in order to be accurate need to be bounded by time and by what you’re likely to care about given the signal in things your’re likely to be connected to. It takes a lot of computing to do this, but that’s what it takes to be accurate.

It also makes intuitive sense when you think about it this way: “What do you want to talk about this time tomorrow?” I would hope the answer is that you probably don’t know, and therefore you need to compare all of the things you could talk about, that you know about, that you have an interest in and then as humans, we’ll do an approximate ordinal calculation of what is most engaging. Those are the tweets you’ll want to see.

The people in the broader see if Tweets in cases like this are actually noise in a lot of cases. Users that tend to follow Account A may be inclined to prefer a topic much more than users of Account B, especially given the current conversations they are seeing and have access to. It’s complicated, but the results of this study are not surprising.

It’s why we’re able to be so effective here at SocialFlow. We’ve put quite a bit of effort into figuring this out, and it’s a very difficult problem to solve. You need to have the right mindset to even frame the problem, and you have to be willing to learn through multiple game-turns – because there is no way, as a human, you’ll be able to predict the number of things that can vary and impact people’s preference for discussion. Life is simply too complex for that, but it’s also what makes it cool to be alive, and free to engage in sharing thoughts.

Great article.