
“Me”: The one word journalists should add to Twitter searches - JacobAldridge
https://medium.com/@bydanielvictor/the-one-word-reporters-should-add-to-twitter-searches-that-you-probably-haven-t-considered-fadab1bc34e8#.cgkrddxco
======
krazydad
> "Imagine what your perfect source would tweet, or what you yourself would
> tweet in that situation, and search for the words that would probably be in
> it."

This is a technique I used to use a lot more in the days before Google became
the dominant search engine, when I was using Lycos, Alta Vista and Yahoo. In
those more primitive search engines that were doing something closer to a
full-text search, it was important to use the words and verb tenses that were
likely to appear in the answer (or target page/tweet), not in the question.

So for example, instead of querying "Which museum is the Mona Lisa in?" it was
best to query "collection includes the mona lisa" and similar phrases.

Needless to say, third generation search engines like Google made this all
unnecessary, and hopefully, Twitter will get there too, eventually.

~~~
gue5t
This is still how web searching works. I have no idea why you would think
otherwise--at its core Google is still fundamentally an indexing service, and
you use indices by figuring out which words may be in the documents you want
to read and then finding the documents containing those. Without doing this,
it becomes impossible to distinguish documents which _are_ what you want from
documents which _describe_ what you want (and which often refer to something
behind a paywall or in a private or non-digitized collection).

~~~
whybroke
I dunno...

[https://www.google.com/search?q=how+can+i+pirate+movies](https://www.google.com/search?q=how+can+i+pirate+movies)

Seems to have no results about pirate movies.

~~~
gue5t
The only result, of the 10 on that page (right now, for me), that answers the
question is [https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-bittorrent-is-the-best-way-
to-...](https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-bittorrent-is-the-best-way-to-pirate-
movies-and-tv-shows-130323/‎)

But if you search "using * to pirate movies" (google will match the star, even
in quotes, with a word or phrase in result context), _every_ result will
include the name of a method for pirating movies, which you can investigate
further. I see "popcorn time", "bit torrent", "pirate bay" and "camcorder" on
the first page. These are all direct answers that a human would consider
reasonable (though of varying efficacy) to the question.

~~~
cwyers
I mean, but if you only need one link that answers the question, 1/10 is not
any less useful than 10/10.

------
sjbase
I have an interesting dilemma.

On one hand, I want to commend you for not using the author's clickbait title.

On the other hand, I don't want to give the author more exposure (because of
the clickbait title) by increasing this post's comment score.

In the end, the first hand won. Thanks! :)

~~~
JacobAldridge
OP here, Thanks for noticing the linkbait work-around. I thought it was a
useful piece, but similarly didn't want to reward the original title.

~~~
raldi
Well, you get two upvotes from me.

------
fenollp
This is a really naive search method for a person whose job is to be good at
this.

It's like watching the Spotlight team going through volumes of data
themselves…

Isn't Data Journalist a thing already?

~~~
jldugger
What's your argument exactly? That they should have used narrower terms until
they found an article that was already written?

~~~
fenollp
They use a syntax-aware search (thus refining for ME, MY, …). I thought
(hoped) that journalists among all people would be the best at semantic
search.

Here the guy is just saying "whoa great dude and next I'll use regexps oh my
god woaw". We have word2vec, doc2vec, many cores, … why aren't journalists
using the tools they should be using?

~~~
fudged71
I would read this post if you wrote it... because I don't know what word2vec &
doc2vec are and why they are useful.

If you write the post maybe someone will be inspired to build a tool for
journalists using these algos.

------
armandososa
This is why Twitter is awesome and something entirely different from Facebook.
It would be a shame to see it go.

------
wcdolphin
This insight seems like a great opportunity for classification or tagging. I
wonder what a stream of tweets which were purely autobiographical would look
like.

------
lal00
(what is that orange number above the nick? is it related to klout?)

------
tmostak
This is really interesting. A great tool to search geocoded tweets is the MapD
Tweetmap
[http://www.mapd.com/demos/tweetmap](http://www.mapd.com/demos/tweetmap) (full
disclosure, my company). For example, here
([http://bit.ly/1KIPSqh](http://bit.ly/1KIPSqh)) are tweets containing “seat”
and “me”.

~~~
chris_wot
Now every arsehole spammer will add the words "I'm OK me my" and when a major
accident occurs the mode of transport or disaster related noun to their tweets

And this is why we can't have nice things. Twitter doesn't kill spam bots fast
enough and Twitter spammers and slimey SEO douchebags crap in their own
backyard. No wonder Twitter is going down: between the gamergaters, doxxers,
trolls, female hating mysogynists, outraged eavesdroppers, rape loving, NLP
wielding pick-up artists, swot-abusers, and vapid, brain-dead, useless
celebrities - how does Twitter even exist?

It's truly amazing how a medium with only a 140 character limit can a. make
money, b. communicate anything really worthwhile, or c. be read by anyone with
any serious intent! Several years ago the criticisms were that everyone
tweeted about mundane crap and it went down frequently [1], now it's being
abandoned because it's no better than swimming in a sewage system [2].

1\. [http://youtu.be/b5Ff2X_3P_4](http://youtu.be/b5Ff2X_3P_4)

2\. [http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/02/stephen-fry-quits-
twi...](http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/02/stephen-fry-quits-twitter-
baftas)

~~~
girvo
Do you really think those (abhorrent) kinds of people make up the bulk of
Twitter's voice? Because my feed certainly isn't.

~~~
chris_wot
Yup. Your feed might not be full of spam, but how are you going with searching
for specific tweets? And I'm assuming you aren't a female who tweets about
feminism or calls out mysogynists and who consequently gets threatened with
rape or murder; you're not a woman or defending women who build or critically
review games; you aren't being doxxed by gamer gaters; you aren't trying to
debate a controversial issue so you aren't getting flamed or trolled; you've
never quietly joked about a dongle at a tech conference and not realised you
were a little bit too loud and subsequently lost your job when someone tweets
your photo instead of confronting you directly or taking it to conference
organisers; and lastly, you aren't a teenager being influenced by celebrities
encouraging you to buy into a vapid and stupid lifestyle instead of
contributing to society in some meaningful way.

You live in a nice world if that's the case. Twitter is great for _you_ , but
pretty awful for everyone else. Which is great, but let's leave Twitter to
this niche market and let everyone else find some other medium that isn't so
corrosive for them. People of course don't leave this medium, and it beats me
why.

------
chetanahuja
Uhhh.. I think I just found what twitter needs to do to make more revenue.
Find a way to charge journalists searching for easy sources to make their
deadline.

------
mintplant
Some of the screenshots include the sources' email addresses in the DMs. The
author really should have taken a moment to blur them out.

~~~
frandroid
They're not DMs, they're public responses. They should still have removed them
though, out of courtesy.

~~~
windwake12
It would have taken 10 seconds to add a box over the username while he was
adding those arrows, given the context of the article, it seems outright
irresponsible.

~~~
vacri
Hardly. He's asking permission to talk to them in the first place, and
presumably asked permission to use their names in the article. And the article
body mentions them by name. _And_ the article is about _how to find them in
the first place_.

You're advocating blurring the names out but then telling readers how to find
them very easily (it's the point of the article) - this would justifiably open
the author to ridicule.

------
gravypod
Personally, I don't understand why the people in the first article, that this
one is about, were upset that someone of another religion wanted to adhere to
their faith.

It seems fairly reasonable that, on air planes non-the-less, that you will
encounter many cultures that seem strange to you. Why would that aggravate
you?

~~~
judah
It really is a case of some being too easily offended.

One woman was offended that a Hasidic Orthodox Jew would not sit by her,
thinking it was hatred of women.

In reality, the man is following his convictions to avoid touching women other
than his wife.

~~~
kordless
Actually, it seems to be an external blaming behavior in that at least one of
the people involved said he didn't want to be tempted when his wife wasn’t
there. That would imply that, by either touching or being near the woman, that
she would become desirable to him by some behavior. It's that _behavior_ that
is being judged (and frequently pre-judged) by these people based on their
beliefs, which is at the root of the problem.

~~~
philh
Do you mean blaming someone else's behaviour? If so, I disagree.

If there was porn on the back of the seat, I think the guy could reasonably
say "I don't want to look at that, I don't want to be tempted". That's not
blaming some behaviour by the porn, he's just saying "in this situation, I
will react this way, and I don't want to".

(I don't like the way they're acting, but I don't think "they're blaming other
people" is what's wrong with it.)

~~~
kordless
> in this situation, I will react this way, and I don't want to

If the "situation" involves another person, then that person has a right to
participate (or not) in whatever emotional response that is happening. If I'm
attractive to you and you don't mind sitting next to me, I'm not required to
show interest in you. If you continue with unwanted advances, you are liable
for sexual harassment. Conversely, if I'm attractive to you and you do mind
sitting next to me because I am attractive to you, I'm not required to help
solve it because _you are attracted to me_ yet are unable to manage your
emotional responses. It still involves me, so I get a say in whether you can
show that attraction in a specific way, including discriminating on me. So is
anyone else, for that matter, given it's cognitive dissonance believing it's
someone else's problem to deal with your inability to contain and manage your
own "purity", which is really a fear of attraction to someone else.

------
brianberns
Isn't "me" a stop word in most search engines? See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words).

~~~
skeletonjelly
I think if you put it in quotes like you did, funnily enough, it'll force it
to be included

------
vanattab
In my opinion journalists need to stop using Twitter as a source altogether.

~~~
apozem
Why? Twitter is a fantastic way to find leads and potential sources. You can't
and shouldn't cite a tweet from a random person, but you can cite reporting
done after finding a source on Twitter.

~~~
vanattab
>You can't and shouldn't cite a tweet from a random person

Except this is exactly what ~90% of the articles that "cite" twitter do.

~~~
atomwaffel
You have a point, but it's explicitly _not_ what the author did. His
screenshots show him replying to each of the tweets, asking to talk to their
authors, and he goes on to tell their stories in the article. If anything,
this shows how valuable a research tool Twitter can be when used properly.

------
robotmlg
Thank you for de-clickbaiting the title

~~~
ihuman
Is there any documentation on what a clickbait title? HN has guidelines on
what to do when the title starts with a number, but the only line about
clickbaiting is kind of generic.[1] Personally, I'm not sure if "I'll know it
when I see it" is the best policy for this, as different people have different
opinions on what clickbait is.

And then we have the problem of people just commenting on the act of editing
the title, and not the actually content. That's hypocritical of me to complain
about, though.

[1] "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or
linkbait."

~~~
Mithaldu
> different people have different opinions on what clickbait is.

Not really, there are just people who haven't seen a specific type of trick
not used ad nauseam, while others have seen it a thousand times already.

"I'll know it when I see it" is sufficient here, since there's a wide variety
of them and with enough experience they can be easily recognized.

In case you would like to have an easier way to learn it though:

Typically clickbait is when the article communicates something (anything,
really) that could easily fit in the title itself, but refuses to do so.
Advanced users compose titles that specifically pique curiosity in the average
person.

