Twitter Reveals Search Engine
Jacksonville – Making everything “far more awesome,” Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, reveals the changes recently made to Twitter’s search tool, enabling Twitter Search to be “a natural part of your normal Twitter experience.”
The most significant and obvious change to Twitter’s search feature is allowing the results to show up on the Twitter home page, rather than redirecting to a separate search results page. Results on the homepage emphasize the sources the searcher is most interested in – that is, ones he or she already reads. In addition, there is the option to save a search, which then makes it a link on the sidebar. This is a useful tool for finding out continually what people are saying about your city, your products, or “just something weird.”
Trend links are another interesting feature of Twitter, although this is still in the beta stage. Words or topics which are used most frequently at a given time will show up in the sidebar. So, it is easy to see at a glance what most other people are doing or tweeting about.
Twitter expects to be ahead of Google for immediate news results. Google’s vast search engine capacity is strong, but an article or page must already exist for it to appear as a result in a Google search. Breaking news items must be written about and published, a process which could take hours. With Twitter, updates are much more immediate, and one has the possibility to stay up-to-date at a much faster rate. This could have a significant impact on the way news is reported and received. The number of Twitter users is growing daily, allowing up-to-the-minute reporting on a variety of subjects, from people around the world. These are elements which make a search engine attractive.
While these features are currently being tested by a small number of users, Twitter expects to roll them out for mainstream use soon. Stone was reported saying that “the technical infrastructure to support it is mostly in place,” and expects to publicize these new features as soon as possible.
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http://twitter.com/spryka