I have just returned from a conference on chemical information held in Sitges - hashtag #icic09. This should be an easy one for Bing Twitter to handle I thought. Silly me. Up came "We did not find any Twitter results or links for icic09". I tried it with and without the hashtag - still nothing. And yet both search.twitter.com and www.twazzup.com had no problem finding tweets from the conference.
Bing Twitter results on #icic09
Twazzup results on #icic09
It also appears that you cannot search on a username. I then compared the results of searches on keywords and names that I knew had been tweeted at the conference: chemspider, chemspiderman, David Walsh, semantic mediawiki, markush. Nothing! It seems that the whole conference has been boycotted by Bing Twitter. I did begin to suspect that the service is not really up and running but searching on Nick Griffin came up with plenty of results and it found a tweet from one of my Twitter network about chickpea curry that had been posted a few minutes before.
There is something seriously wrong with Bing Twitter. Until they fix it and can present credible results I recommend that you give it a miss.
So what of Google's offering? It isn't live yet but there is useful discussion and comments on Google Social Search Is Coming & More On Google-Twitter. The main question for us as searchers is whether or not the Twitter search will be integrated into the standard web search or made available as a separate option. Tweets are already included in the web search as I discovered when I did a search on icic09 but they are spread out amongst the results. It would make sense to have a separate search tool such as Google's Blogsearch. Another option would be to incorporate it into the side bar under "Show options" (See Google new search and display options).
Bing have yet again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. As for Google Twitter, we shall just have to wait and see.
For some time now I've been using a Firefox add-on that retrieves the top 5 Twitter results and adds them to the top of the Google search results page. You have to first install Greasemonkey. ReadWriteWeb has a write-up about it at: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/make_google_real_time_with_twitter_ad-on.php
ReplyDeleteWhile I haven't thoroughly tested the results, I did a quick search this morning for one that you looked for, chemspider, and there were five results, including one from 29 minutes ago.
Hi Debbie
ReplyDeleteI've had the FF Twitter add-on for about a year and it works reasonably well. As you say it just picks up the most recent 5 tweets on your topic. That's probably enough to show any relevant hashtags, user names and whether a full Twitter search is worth doing but I do sometimes wish I could increase the number displayed to perhaps 10.
The only problem I have with it is that I also have the Customise Google add-on with streaming switched on and the Twitter results are repeated every 30 web results.
[...] plannen) Google met Twitter in real-time Search (Dutch comboys). Bing is er ook mee begonnen, zie Twitter search in Bing and Google (Karin Blakeman) en How High Will Real-Time Search Fly? [...]
ReplyDelete[...] Twitter search in Bing and Google [...]
ReplyDelete