I'm not sure I want search results to be littered with tweets. Am I the only one? How do you apply page rank/relevance etc to 140 chars?

Relevance for tweets / status updates is pretty simple: Newer = more relevant.

For example: http://www.google.com/search?q=san+francisco+halloween gives me a bunch of halloween stores

http://twitter.com/#search?q=san%20francisco%20halloween gives me a bunch of events (much more useful for me!)

If those sort of tweets get into search results simply based on "newest", you can be sure it'll be used extensively by marketers trying to spam their way into search listings.

FWIW, Twitter seems to be on top of the arms race right now. A little while back I was getting 3-4 spam followers/@-replies a day; over the past few weeks, though, I've had exactly two.

I am getting these almost every day now. Annoying at first, now I am considering using some other service. Twitter is too popular and popular services eventually become shit.

> I'm not sure I want search results to be littered with tweets.

Granted. I hope they find balance, and imagine they'll AB test to see what users want.

> How do you apply page rank/relevance etc to 140 chars?

Some combination of freshness, quantity of retweets, pagerank of any linked pages, bit.ly stats on links, historic tweet quality of the user, similarity to trending topics, follower count of user, follower/followee ratio, incoming links to the page from blogs, etc, etc, etc.

retweets are one way to quantify relevance. "real people" are not going to retweet something unless they find it meaningful.

I like the idea, but what's going to stop a bot from re-tweeting?

If a lot of people have retweeted you, you are ranked higher on the list, which means that your retweet is ranked higher than retweet from a bot.

Yes but nothing stops a botter from running thousands of bots re-tweeting the main spambot's tweets.

Disagree. As I said a week or so ago. Retweeting is often the same as an email asking you to forward it to 100 friends to get good luck. I don't think that makes for very good measurement of what is important and what isn't.

That is what the engineers get paid to do:)

I'm getting an error message: "Twitter search results are currently unavailable."

Fail Whale on Bing?

Per @ev: http://www.bing.com/twitter

Ewww. I'm sorry, but that page is so ugly my hand impulsively closed it before I could even begin to consider the content.

Yeah, at first glance, it looks like a tag cloud with a bunch of adsense underneath. Funny how we interpret visual patterns...

See also: http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/archive/2009/10/2...

It's pretty slow compared to Twitter's own search. I'm seeing 9 minute index times.

One thing to keep in mind about the size of Facebook's contribution is that not all of their status updates are public. Kara says they do 40M updates per day, but I can't imagine that very many of those are public.

this is trying to solve a problem that does not exist. People use search for definitive answers to their questions.. tweets hardly fit the bill.

Both are non-exclusive... Couldn't someone else do the same partnership or am I missing something?

yep. google is too in talks with twitter.

ummm is this twitters first revenue making step????

am i really far off or has everyone overlooked this? or are they going to give it away from free because their more concerned about growing the community rather than making $$$

Searchable twitter/facebook? Expect a tide of spam soon.