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One problem with tweets is that people often lard them up with so-called "hashtags." These are symbols that start with a pound sign (#) followed by a word that represents a very popular current topic, such as "Nexus One" or "Earthquake" or whatever else might be a trendy topic at the moment. When a hashtag is included in a tweet, the resulting tweet will show up when other Twitterers click the hashtag's topic word elsewhere on the site.
While such tags can usefully maximize exposure of a tweet, they can also serve as red flags to lower tweet quality and attract spam-like content, Singhal says. While he wouldn't get into details, he said Google modeled this hashtagging behavior in ways that tend to reduce the exposure of low-quality tweets. "We needed to model that [hashtagging] behavior. That is the technical challenge which we went after with our modeling approaches," Singhal says.
Another problem: how, if someone is searching for "Obama," to sift through White House press tweets and thousands of others to find the most timely and topical information. Google scans tweets to find the "signal in the noise," he says. Such a "signal" might include a new onslaught of tweets and other blogs that mention "Cambridge police" or "Harry Reid" near mentions of "Obama." By looking out for such signals, Google is able to furnish real-time hits that contain the freshest subject matter even for very common search terms.
In the future, both Twitter and Google hope to improve the relevance of search returns in all contexts by adding geo-location data, which can be added to postings sent from smart phones. In general, real-time search "is evolving," says Dylan Casey, the Google product manager for real-time search. "I talk with the guys at Twitter on a regular basis to learn where the feature is going. We get feedback from them, we give them feedback, and our engineers collaborate. It is truly symbiotic."
Singhal added that Twitter is hardly the only source of real-time information. "Twitter is indeed a very important component of the real-time Web. However, what we are observing is that it is just one of the components. There's a lot of value in news, blogs, and Web pages that are being generated in real-time, because news organizations work very hard to get quality to a certain level," he says. "Twitter is indeed useful because it is short-form content. However, we are finding that the real-time Web is much bigger."
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I've recently come to know of a new service that lets one "buy" a ReTweet of their content. This begs the question, would the Google algorithm favor or penalize such Tweets when scoring such content?
Interestingly enough, the article I posted about ReTweet.it has received mixed reviews.
Would be interested to read and hear your take on this ReTweet.it API and how the Google bots will score such content?
Thank you for a great article.
arthurattwell, as far as I know Google is not considering your following/follower ratio, it's more about the overall numbers of followers. So, even if you have 200 followers and follow 20, and someone else has 12000 followers and follows 13000, the latter person will have their tweet shown higher up. Again, I don't know this for a fact, but that's what I derived from the articles I've read. In the end, it's all fair with Google taking into the account authority of your followers.
I do not understand why hashtagging would be detrimental to google's desire for relevance?
Very interesting. I can't understand why hash tagging would be a problem for them either.
I did like the information about the credence given to the amount and quality of followers though. Particularly as I have just finally found a tool to ethically get tons of new Twitter followers on autopilot.
Here's what I am using right now http://www.TwittollowerReview.com and it seems like, from what you say, Google will give me the credence of having a lot of followers (1,600 followers in first 3 weeks).
Hope that's the case!
Interesting that Google is dinging hash tags for search relevancy even though they are the designed search mechanism for Twitter. Seems like hash tags are like SEM and non-hash tags are like SEO.
Just another example of how popularity trumps intelligence. Anyone at MIT (or elsewhere) see problems with this? Clearly the two aren't mutually exclusive, but dang, a ranking model this simplistic, from Google no less, is an insult. I thought they hired the best. Apparently, they hired the in kids.
As Twitter matures, I suspect the bar will be set higher when deciding who to follow and who will follow you back. Like most, I've experimented with more than a few Twitter marketing tools. The ones I prefer are those that customize my settings, so I can better track my followers and purge those who need purging. With only 14,500 followers, I'm by no means a major Twitter player, but since I use Bit.Ly to track my followers post-tweet activity, I can quickly decide who I need to add to my Purge List
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arthurattwell
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It would be interesting to know whether Google takes Twitter users' following:follower ratio into account (and retweetability for that matter). I like to assume Google's thought of everything. The thought of some follow-trawler getting great Google ranking is frightening.
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