Twitter Search API Changes – More Exciting News From Twitter!

I've just received the following announcement from Taylor Singletary at Twitter:

"As indicated a few weeks ago, we're launching our new *beta* enhancements to search.twitter.com and the Search API today -- it's currently rolling out to our servers. Thank you all for your feedback."

I usually comment on these things after I've had a look at some of the resulting data, but in this case, there are some interesting facets of the announcement that I'd like to reproduce here.

"To date, Twitter's real-time search has proven to be incredibly valuable.� People, businesses and organizations have come to depend on finding out what's being discussed about a particular topic *right now*.

"We've been really impressed at the integrations many of you have developed using the Search API. Whether it's offering search columns in a Twitter client, mapping #hashtags to search, or deep analysis of trends and brand monitoring, you've shown us what's possible with Twitter search.

"With this new project, we want to make real-time search even more valuable by surfacing the best tweets about a particular topic, by considering recency, but also the interactions on a tweet. This means analyzing the author's profile, as well as the number times the tweet has been retweeted,
favorited, replied, and more. It's an evolving algorithm that we'll be iterating on & tuning until practically the end of time.

"With this initial release, if we detect that there are particularly interesting & relevant tweets for a given query, we'll display at most 3 of these tweets at the top of the page. We'll also display the number of times these tweets have been recently retweeted as well."

That's a pretty impressive capability if they've really done it. I've held off commenting on Twitter's new "front page" for people who aren't signed in, mostly because I've been waiting to see if it had any impact on the rate at which new users join Twitter, and that takes a few days to get a large enough sample to be meaningful. I don't personally use the information that's on the front page - I either use commercial tools like Clicky and ViralHeat or go directly to the data via the APIs.

But the new metadata that's coming from Twitter Search is going to radically alter the way I use Twitter Search. So, as the saying goes, "Watch This Space!"

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