Social Media Search is Different

Twingly (certainly a company to watch in this space) today announced their microblog(twitter, jaiku, etc.) search engine. While I think it is great to see more activity in this space, I can't help but be puzzled by current approaches to searching social media. We are faced with a very different type of content, with a very different ecology and yet we throw archaic interaction paradigms around it.

Take a search on the Twingly search engine for 'inauguration day". I get back a set of results with the following:

• Happy Inauguration day!
• Twitter is going to be so bogged down today. I already have been unable to see pics for 24 hours. Happy Inauguration Day everyone!
• Watching Inauguration DayLIVE on MSNBC. <3 GOBAMA 2009.
• Wish I was in DC; happy inauguration day everyone!
• Happy Inauguration Day Oregon! Where's everyone watching today?

I'm trying to figure out what I learned from this. It seems obvious to me that there is a lot to be learned from microblog data, but search is exactly the way to bury that information. I'd much rather see

• Trends: show me how these terms are changing over time
• Associations: show me aggregates of terms associated with the query
• Author information: tell me something about the distribution of demographic features of the authors.

Comments

[Matt Smith]

You make a good point --- it seems that an incremental summarization algorithm would make sense here. I wonder if Twitter uses any of techniques to accomplish this behind the scenes...

Google seems to have a handle on at least trends and associations, and searcher information (but not author information), but summary information for the most current form of data (microblogging) seems much more exciting.

[Ed Chi]

The reason people put up these things is because it's easy, and thinking hard about how search should be different also runs up against what people are used to. We have been prototyping MrTaggy.com's interaction design, and people still expect a big white box and opportunity to type in lots of keywords. The general public still don't yet fully understand social media, and neither do we. But yes, I agree, we should have more varied search interfaces and experiences.

[Travis Spencer]

I think the reason that you see implementations like this is because what we call "search" today is really "location finding". I tell a search engine what I want, it tells me a bunch of places where I might be able to find it. Then, I have the pleasure of seeing if any of those locations actually has the information that I'm after :-P

You are completely right. We need a better, newer way.