We’ve been watching this episode since yesterday. Some Twitter users were noticing that anything with RT in it wasn’t being seen in certain search functions. The community as a whole went into an uproar.
It seems that Twitter heard that message loud and clear. We contacted Twitter, and were just given this response via email:
“We’ve been experimenting with ways to identify duplicate content, and recently implemented an approach that identifies retweets as duplicates. This only applied for logged-in searches on www.twitter.com, not to searches on search.twitter.com, search APIs, or the logged-out homepage. However, this change has not had a positive impact on the user experience so we plan to revert it. Eliminating explicitly duplicative content from search results in a more intelligent way is something we plan to work on more in the long-term.”
It’s always great to see when a company listens to the user base, and even greater when they take an extended hand. The RT function is important to many of us, and Twitter sees that fact.
