Twitter’s Search Results By Popularity Goes Live

As we reported last month, Twitter is attempting to make their search results more relevant by ordering Twitter search results by importance.

Twitter’s Developer Advocate Taylor Singletary shares details of the roll out in Twitter’s developer talk Google Group.

Singletary explains that Twitter aims to make Twitter’s search results more “valuable by surfacing the best tweets about a particular topic.” To do this, Twitter analyses the number of times the tweet was retweeted, favorited, replied to and more and plans to improve on the algorithm over time.

What Twitter have done cleverly is that they have chosen to only display ‘at most’ 3 of these tweets at the top of the page. The tweets will highlight the number of times the tweet has been retweeted as an indication of its popularity. This will ensure the new feature doesn’t entirely replace the current set of search results but does ensure important tweets are visible.

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The new feature is live on http://search.twitter.com, we couldn’t find too many searches that featured the a “popular tweet” but one example can be seen below or click here.

The feature is also optionally being made available to developers via the Twitter API.

Developers are able to access:

• Mixed Tweets – receive both “popular tweets” and most recent tweets for the query. This is the equivalent of the future default behavior.
• Popular Tweets – receive only “popular tweets” for the query.
• Recent Tweets – receive only recent results for the query. This is the equivalent of the behavior you’ve come to expect until present