RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/rt-google-tweets-and-updates-and-search.html

by vulpes • 17 years ago

59 33 17 years ago

googleblog.blogspot.com

mrshoe3• 17 years ago

Microsoft unveils Bing Twitter search today and Google's hurried response is a blog post about how they've "reached an agreement" to include tweets in their search results. Ouch.

Microsoft still has some fight in it yet, folks! It's not often that other companies are scrambling to keep up with them these days.

dschobel• 17 years ago

I doubt this battle will be settled (or even affected) by the fact that MS was first to market with this feature.

Who has the better integration and implementation is far more interesting.

seldo• 17 years ago

Agreed. This looks like an embarrassingly reactive move.

axod3• 17 years ago

It's better to do something properly than be first to market. Better to think through exactly how best to present the information to the users.

http://bing.com/twitter is pretty ugly, and seems to not be working currently.

sgk284• 17 years ago

Perhaps it's more telling that Bing thought they had one up on Google, only to find out that Google was already there.

mrshoe3• 17 years ago

That's an interesting way to spin it in Google's favor, but:

1) When MS signed a non-exclusive agreement with Twitter, they must have been 99% sure that Google would be in on the Twitter action as well (i.e. I doubt they ever thought they were one up on Google), and

2) The point is that Google is not already there. All they have to show for themselves is an agreement so far. (MS has http://www.bing.com/twitter up and running already.)

Being first to market isn't everything, but I still think this is a noteworthy exception to the norm of recent years.

misuba4• 17 years ago

Google wasn't the first search engine, either.

volida2• 17 years ago

Neither Bing. Whatever that means.

ottbot• 17 years ago

I think only the announcement is hurried, I'm sure this has been in the works longer.

The first company to release the feature won't matter much in the end, it's all about implementation and market share..

So I wouldn't call it "scrambling", more just a "why yes, we've thought of this too, and we're working on it"..

axod3• 17 years ago

>> "scrambling to keep up with them these days."

huh? Both announced they were going to use twitter data :/

It all depends who presents that information in a useful way - my money is on google reading their blog post. I hardly think google are 'scrambling to keep up with them'.

mrshoe3• 17 years ago

http://www.bing.com/twitter

You're right that it still remains to be seen who puts the data to better use in the long term, though.

revorad• 17 years ago

Did you try using Bing? I got: Twitter search results are currently unavailable.

the_real_r2d22• 17 years ago

Not working for either. As many others I think that both (MS and Google) tried to win the other with lame PR and a broken application. The result is embarrassing for both.

FreeRadical• 17 years ago

This Microsoft Google war is incredible

jey• 17 years ago

In related news: Google jumps shark, announces vaporware.

antirez• 17 years ago

seems like twitter found a viable business model.

thwarted2• 17 years ago

If Google agreed to pay twitter for this information, this may set a precedent that google would rather not have and that some publishers have been pushing for for a while, that Google pay people to have their content crawled.

misuba4• 17 years ago

This isn't a crawl deal; this is a deal for access to "the firehose," the realtime data of all public tweets that Twitter most certainly does not give away anymore.

the_real_r2d22• 17 years ago

Too early to really judge. Let's see how Bing's results from twitter are and then wait for Google. I think that a success will be how they will mine the results. Today from the search results in twitter-search are pretty lame and useless. If Bing or Google can reduce the noisy ratio an get useful results, then we will have a winner.

ivankirigin• 17 years ago

I love that the title of this post rendered well on @ newsycombinator

http://twitter.com/newsycombinator/status/5053508006

jwesley• 17 years ago

Bing.com/twitter is actually pretty cool for topics that have recently been in the news, especially the most shared links. On the other hand, if you search for anything that is not news oriented and is highly commercial, the results are super spammy.

chanux• 17 years ago

Googles idea seems more realistic. To search Twitter we got search.twitter.com. What we need is something organize and filter data in a nice (if you don't mind, rad) way.

pilif• 17 years ago

I kind of can't believe that both google and microsoft seem to have given in: We knew for quite some time (document leak this summer) that twitter was trying to make the search engines pay for access, but I would have hoped that Google and MS had more guts to not make such an agreement.

There are various reasons for that:

1) it sets a bad precedence. Up until now, all (significant) content was accessible to the search engines without barrier and to index the web, aside of general algorithmic improvements, no changes in the way how spiders work were needed.

2) I don't see why Twitter should decide who can and who can't access the content I made publically available (by tweeting). This should be open to anybody requiring the data.

2) The information in twitter, frankly, does not need to be exposed into Google as it IMHO does not contain enough original information. Twitter is about conversations and links to stuff that is in the search engines anyways and the conversations don't really provide that much added value.

3) Twitter gains as much (or even more - see above) from Engines indexing them as the engines gain from being able to index Twitter.

And lastly: In all other places of the internet that are indexed by search engines, I as the author can specify whether I want the content I create to be indexed or not (robots.txt, X-No-Archive-Headers and so on).

As far as I can see, there is no way to make my conversations not appear in Google or any other place - and yes: Conversations. Tweets are not always real content, but often times just bits and pieces of conversations.

In a perfect world:

1) there would be a standard on how to feed search engines (or any other interested party) with that content.

2) Twitter and other micro blogging services would adhere to said standard

3) Twitter and other micro blogging services would allow me as a user to chose whether my insignificant content is archived/indexed or not, preferably per tweet.

RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my

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