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What am I missing here? How does seeing tweets (unless they are intelligently selected) help me when searching for something on Google? As of late: I only rely

by tannerc 12y ago

What am I missing here? How does seeing tweets (unless they are intelligently selected) help me when searching for something on Google? As of late: I only rely on Google for finding the best place to get an answer for a question I know exists in reliable places for the subject matter (re: programming, cooking, etc.). If I suddenly start seeing tweets in my search results, how does that improve my search experience? The immediate exception that comes to mind would be related to real-time events, but even then...how much value can 140 characters be for the website that has indexed "everything?"

stevenjohns 12y ago
Might be something like Bing where searching a famous person's name would return a lot of content about them [1], such as their social media links, songs, movies or TV shows they were involved in [2], Wikipedia excerpts, photos, etc. They might just embed that user's tweets or something in the search results now. Also note the "Tweeted about Bill Gates" section in the first link. [1] http://www.bing.com/search?q=Bill+Gates&go=Submit&qs=n&form=QBLH&pq=bill+gates&sc=0-0&sp=-1&sk=&cvid=1701107824094c0eae51bb8239789d3c http://www.bing.com/search?q=Bill+Gates&go=Submit&qs=n&form=... [2] http://www.bing.com/search?q=Pharrell&go=Submit&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=pharrell&sc=8-14&sp=-1&sk=&cvid=67ED1A820B014897B99A123867E654E1 http://www.bing.com/search?q=Pharrell&go=Submit&qs=n&form=QB...
davidcgl 12y ago
> How does seeing tweets (unless they are intelligently selected) help me when searching for something on Google? Google is probably smart enough to realize users don't want tweets for every query. > If I suddenly start seeing tweets in my search results, how does that improve my search experience? It'd be useful if users explicitly search for it, like [superbowl tweets], a trending hashtag, or a breaking news/event. Though, how they decide to present the tweets would be a ui/ux challenge.
sparkzilla 12y ago
I wrote a recent blog post about this exact problem. Google search results have become increasingly fragmented in an attempt to try to give some hint to where the actual result is. For example a search on Ariana Grande will return a list of sites, some knowledge graph info (from Wikipedia), some news and YouTube links, and now some Twitter links. I put this down to a limitation of algorithmic search and, at least to me, this behavior indicates that Google is not good at determining what the question is. http://newslines.org/blog/googles-black-hole/ http://newslines.org/blog/googles-black-hole/
wutbrodo 12y ago
I find Google search to be an incredible tool 99% of the tie, but multiple times recently I've tried looking something realtime up ("holy crap there's a ton of smoke coming from X part of town", "what are those loudspeakers I can hear in the distance, is there a protest going on or something?"), and Google News doesn't turn up anything for quite some time. I'm not a particularly big fan of Twitter, but it pretty reliably will have a mention of something like that pretty quickly.

by tannerc 12y ago

stevenjohns 12y ago

Might be something like Bing where searching a famous person's name would return a lot of content about them [1], such as their social media links, songs, movies or TV shows they were involved in [2], Wikipedia excerpts, photos, etc. They might just embed that user's tweets or something in the search results now. Also note the "Tweeted about Bill Gates" section in the first link. [1] http://www.bing.com/search?q=Bill+Gates&go=Submit&qs=n&form=QBLH&pq=bill+gates&sc=0-0&sp=-1&sk=&cvid=1701107824094c0eae51bb8239789d3c http://www.bing.com/search?q=Bill+Gates&go=Submit&qs=n&form=... [2] http://www.bing.com/search?q=Pharrell&go=Submit&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=pharrell&sc=8-14&sp=-1&sk=&cvid=67ED1A820B014897B99A123867E654E1 http://www.bing.com/search?q=Pharrell&go=Submit&qs=n&form=QB...

davidcgl 12y ago

> How does seeing tweets (unless they are intelligently selected) help me when searching for something on Google? Google is probably smart enough to realize users don't want tweets for every query. > If I suddenly start seeing tweets in my search results, how does that improve my search experience? It'd be useful if users explicitly search for it, like [superbowl tweets], a trending hashtag, or a breaking news/event. Though, how they decide to present the tweets would be a ui/ux challenge.

sparkzilla 12y ago

I wrote a recent blog post about this exact problem. Google search results have become increasingly fragmented in an attempt to try to give some hint to where the actual result is. For example a search on Ariana Grande will return a list of sites, some knowledge graph info (from Wikipedia), some news and YouTube links, and now some Twitter links. I put this down to a limitation of algorithmic search and, at least to me, this behavior indicates that Google is not good at determining what the question is. http://newslines.org/blog/googles-black-hole/ http://newslines.org/blog/googles-black-hole/

wutbrodo 12y ago

I find Google search to be an incredible tool 99% of the tie, but multiple times recently I've tried looking something realtime up ("holy crap there's a ton of smoke coming from X part of town", "what are those loudspeakers I can hear in the distance, is there a protest going on or something?"), and Google News doesn't turn up anything for quite some time. I'm not a particularly big fan of Twitter, but it pretty reliably will have a mention of something like that pretty quickly.