Google searching Twitter? OneRiot does it already

May 7, 2009 | Paul Boutin | Comments |
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Twitter’s search tool is about to become more sophisticated, CNET reports. The current Twitter search only looks through the text of individual tweets, and sorts results by freshness — newest first. Soon, though, you’ll hopefully be able to search not just the word in tweets, but the content of the pages to which they link, with a Google-like “reputation” ranking on results. So if a lot of Twitterers link to the same blog page about the new Star Trek movie, your search for “trek” will return the blog post, not a bunch of tweets about it.

You can try such a search of tweeted links already at OneRiot. The upstart social-network search engine crawls Twitter, follows the links, and creates a database of the content of Web pages and videos linked from recent Twitter updates. Right now, Thursday afternoon, a search for “Star Trek” returns as top result a hilarious Onion parody news report.

You won’t find the Onion clip easily in a Google News search, because Google News is too heavily skewed towards the New York Times and other national newspapers. A Google – Twitter alliance would let you see what’s hot on social networks today. Be honest: Would you rather read the Los Angeles Times’ ousidery review of the movie, or watch the Onion parody? Twitter has spoken.

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Photo of Paul Boutin

About the Author, Paul Boutin

Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • No search yet, but head to http://tweetlinx.com and log in with your twitter account - automatic link aggregation and previews from a crawler scraping your twitter friends' statuses. I'm using it as a custom newsreader (and I just stumbled across this article with it http://tweetlinx.com/markhuetsch).
  • that's exactly why i don't understand what is the use of such a search engine. twitter is a tool for creating trends, but that doesn't make those trends useful. if something is very hot on social networks, it's either a funny (and often dumb) youtube video or a parody or pure spam. nothing beats good ol' google, they just need to make their news crawling a little bit faster.
  • hi paul,

    i wanted to let you know of our service which we built in a couple of weeks. we took twitter + daylife + google hot trends + twitpic and created a mashup for a real real time news mag.

    check it out and i hope you like it - http://www.all140.com

    lukas
  • Google+Twitter is interesting and a good step. I have been working on a site that actually uses YOUR network to re-rank search results and integrates real-time results in w/ regular search results, as google is supposedly going to do.

    http://www.re-searchr.com/

    James
  • Great stuff from Oneriot.com
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