
RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my - vulpes
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/rt-google-tweets-and-updates-and-search.html
======
mrshoe
Microsoft unveils Bing Twitter search today and Google's hurried response is a
blog post about how they've "reached an agreement" to include tweets in their
search results. Ouch.

Microsoft still has some fight in it yet, folks! It's not often that other
companies are scrambling to keep up with them these days.

~~~
seldo
Agreed. This looks like an embarrassingly reactive move.

~~~
axod
It's better to do something properly than be first to market. Better to think
through exactly how best to present the information to the users.

<http://bing.com/twitter> is pretty ugly, and seems to not be working
currently.

~~~
stanleydrew
And when I do a regular Bing search for, say, "ac milan," I'm not getting any
real-time information, twitter-based or otherwise. Going to bing.com/twitter
doesn't seem to be an improvement over just going to twitter.com to run my
real-time search.

Searching "ac milan" on Google does at least bring up their last Serie A
result and a news story about how they came from behind to beat Madrid this
afternoon. I'm pretty sure Google will find a good way to integrate real-time
tweets and status updates into its regular search results.

~~~
diego
<http://search.trendistic.com/ac-milan>

Or if you prefer a chart

<http://trendistic.com/milan/_24-hours>

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pilif
I kind of can't believe that both google and microsoft seem to have given in:
We knew for quite some time (document leak this summer) that twitter was
trying to make the search engines pay for access, but I would have hoped that
Google and MS had more guts to not make such an agreement.

There are various reasons for that:

1) it sets a bad precedence. Up until now, all (significant) content was
accessible to the search engines without barrier and to index the web, aside
of general algorithmic improvements, no changes in the way how spiders work
were needed.

2) I don't see why Twitter should decide who can and who can't access the
content I made publically available (by tweeting). This should be open to
anybody requiring the data.

2) The information in twitter, frankly, does not need to be exposed into
Google as it IMHO does not contain enough original information. Twitter is
about conversations and links to stuff that is in the search engines anyways
and the conversations don't really provide that much added value.

3) Twitter gains as much (or even more - see above) from Engines indexing them
as the engines gain from being able to index Twitter.

And lastly: In all other places of the internet that are indexed by search
engines, I as the author can specify whether I want the content I create to be
indexed or not (robots.txt, X-No-Archive-Headers and so on).

As far as I can see, there is no way to make my conversations not appear in
Google or any other place - and yes: Conversations. Tweets are not always real
content, but often times just bits and pieces of conversations.

In a perfect world:

1) there would be a standard on how to feed search engines (or any other
interested party) with that content.

2) Twitter and other micro blogging services would adhere to said standard

3) Twitter and other micro blogging services would allow me as a user to chose
whether my insignificant content is archived/indexed or not, preferably per
tweet.

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jwesley
Bing.com/twitter is actually pretty cool for topics that have recently been in
the news, especially the most shared links. On the other hand, if you search
for anything that is not news oriented and is highly commercial, the results
are super spammy.

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ivankirigin
I love that the title of this post rendered well on @ newsycombinator

<http://twitter.com/newsycombinator/status/5053508006>

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the_real_r2d2
Too early to really judge. Let's see how Bing's results from twitter are and
then wait for Google. I think that a success will be how they will mine the
results. Today from the search results in twitter-search are pretty lame and
useless. If Bing or Google can reduce the noisy ratio an get useful results,
then we will have a winner.

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antirez
seems like twitter found a viable business model.

~~~
thwarted
If Google agreed to pay twitter for this information, this may set a precedent
that google would rather not have and that some publishers have been pushing
for for a while, that Google pay people to have their content crawled.

~~~
misuba
This isn't a crawl deal; this is a deal for access to "the firehose," the
realtime data of all public tweets that Twitter most certainly does not give
away anymore.

~~~
thwarted
Doesn't matter. Google paying someone for access to content? Get in line!

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chanux
Googles idea seems more realistic. To search Twitter we got
search.twitter.com. What we need is something organize and filter data in a
nice (if you don't mind, rad) way.

------
jey
In related news: Google jumps shark, announces vaporware.

