Hands On: Rank vs Recent Twitter Searching
On a slow news weekend it took just one request from Frenchmen Loic Le Meur to set the tubes a blaze. He wanted to see Twitter search results by authority (number of followers). While this certainly raises some questions, its not a terrible thing to request. In fact I was also curious what the search results might look like.
So I asked our special projects guru Ryan Sit to work something up. The result is an interesting mashup, results based on rank and time posted with both being displayed side by side. Give it a test drive yourself here.
Let’s start with the original reason Loic requested the feature, ego searching his Le Web event.
Already we can begin to see some of the shortcomings, at least for this topic. When ordered by rank the first results are dominated by Robert Scoble and Loic himself. Once you scroll down a bit though you begin to see some other nice results based on rank. The right side displays most recent twits and also looks to contain some nice results too.
Try it with a few other topics:
Tomorrow we can add a few more tweeks to the site and welcome your feedback. I’ll also have Ryan share some of the ways he has done this using the Twitter API.
Do Twitter results based on authority do anything for you?
On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 4 people and commented on 6 times 
December 29th, 2008 at 7:34 am
[...] Originally posted here: Hands On: Rank vs Recent Twitter Searching [...]
December 29th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Try searching on “linch”. That’s where you’ll get the real zeitgeist of Twitter:
http://agitationist.com/1500-more-reasons-twitter-must-die
December 29th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
[...] [...]
December 29th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
[...] can read more about Twithority on the blog of Sean Percival, who asked Ryan Sit to create an authority [...]
December 30th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Or, you know, Friendfeed kinda handles the GROUPING AND THREADING OF TOPICS, but jesus christ, we can’t get off the Twitter dick.
Of course the business mod—
Oops, nevermind.
January 4th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
[...] And I’m glad to see my friend Sean Percival is on the case already with Twithority, which gives a side-by-side of time-based Twitter searches versus ones [...]
March 21st, 2009 at 4:26 am
[...] Over the weekend, Sean Percival and Ryan Sit also developed a Twitter search engine based on authority popularity, with a twist. [...]
May 27th, 2009 at 2:48 am
thats great that you are talking about the twitter api,a good example of searching with the twitter api is on twiogle.com because you can search on twitter and google at the same time.
July 20th, 2009 at 5:40 am
[...] ranks its Twitter search results by the authority of each user, as measured by the number of followers. Again, you can click on currently popular searches from Twithority’s home [...]
August 26th, 2009 at 9:54 am
[...] trends based on the weighted discussions surrounding relevant topics.UPDATE: Over the weekend, Sean Percival and Ryan Sit also developed a Twitter search engine based on authority popularity, with a twist. [...]