Story by
Chad Catacchio
Chad Catacchio is a contributor writing on a variety of topics in tech. He has held management positions at a number of tech companies in th Chad Catacchio is a contributor writing on a variety of topics in tech. He has held management positions at a number of tech companies in the US and China. Check out his personal blog to connect with him or follow him on Twitter (if you dare).
Topsy, the third-party Twitter search engine, has launched Topsy Expert Search to help you find topical experts on Twitter.
It’s pretty straightforward – just type in a topic that you are interested and Topsy gives you a ranked list of “experts” – at least in the Twitter sense – on the topic you’re searching on. Best part is – it works pretty well, at least for the searches we did. For instance, we did one for “climbers” and a strong list of actual rock climbers showed up in the results. We also searched for “apple” (which of course could mean the company or the fruit) and again, a strong list of Apple experts showed up.
Not all searches, however, were exactly as we expected: for instance, we searched for “new york” and a bunch of sport team Twitter accounts showed up. Relevant, but not exactly the experts we were anticipating. Please let us know in the comments what you think.
Topsy explains in their blog that it has been:
“working on solving this problem using an algorithmic approach and are excited to release Topsy Expert Search, which lets you discover knowledgeable, interesting and active users on any topic or keyword. Expert Search ranks results based on influence and topical focus, and works for any topic, however obscure”
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