louisgray.com - Latest Comments in Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Marco — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 06:35:47 -0000

There is an offiziell Twitter issue.. now.

http://twitter.zendesk.com/...

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Pascal — Fri, 29 May 2009 09:13:07 -0000

Do you know that we are closed to the 2 billionth tweet ?

See http://www.tweespeed.com which gives the "instant speed of twitter" and try to estimate the reaching date. Amazing.

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Jay Bryant — Tue, 26 May 2009 09:16:07 -0000

No kidding Twitter search is broken. None of my tweets over the last nine days (http://www.twitter.com/jays... show up in the search. For some reason my account has been excluded from the twitter search. No explanation yet from Twitter.

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Jim Connolly — Tue, 26 May 2009 06:26:41 -0000

Interesting post Louis.

The element that's bugging me right now, is how useless Twitter's 'trending topics' feature has become; thanks to spam.

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Mark Evans — Sat, 23 May 2009 07:41:30 -0000

Louis,

What I find interesting is that despite search potentially being a key asset for Twitter, the better and more useful search applications are being created by third-parties such as Twazzup and Twingly.

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Mark Bean — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:00:19 -0000

@Paul - you can't give Twitter any slack when comparing it to email because the retards that built Twitter should have learned how to architect a system to handle any amount of traffic. It's not that hard. As Scoble and many others point out - FriendFeed can handle much more complex data problems. #TwitterSucks

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

PeteWright — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:37:18 -0000

I suppose that's a defensible argument. :)

The problem, however, doesn't appear to be explicitly about money. Rather, it's the scale of the engineering challenges they're up against. I find myself wishing I could be a fly on the wall at Twitter -- this is a team that simply must be pulling their hair out to rectify the fruits of early engineering shortcuts regarding integration (search from Summize) and scaling. I've been commenting (apparently) negatively about Twitter lately -- I absolutely adore the service were it not for two things. First, it's unreliable. Second, I want more control to reduce noise. The perfect fix for both of these issues for me has been FriendFeed of late, but I'm still on Twitter and support what their doing. Really looking forward to substance coming out of Twitter HQ in the coming weeks.

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Paul — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:30:04 -0000

Remember that email was first available in 1974, and it took a couple of decades before it became the tool we all know and use, today. Twitter needs to be around for a bit longer before it is given parity with email, regardless of Moore's Law and its effect on new technology adoption.

That being said, I definitely agree that Twitter needs an angel with experience in scaling. It probably (should have) realized this pretty early on, when the explosion in users was first detected and projections for the future were being developed. It's really just a matter of money ... and that's probably what's slowing things down. I mean, when will Twitter become profitable? For that matter, HOW will they become profitable? At least Google, Microsoft and Apple (by far the least experienced of the three) have deep pockets and well-monetized public channels.

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

piers — Fri, 22 May 2009 14:16:49 -0000

Well put. It's a free service, and you get what you pay for. It does some things well, some things poorly. And a catch 22 - Twitter could offer premium service, but could they support it?

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

piers — Fri, 22 May 2009 14:06:23 -0000

Thank you! I couldn't agree more, and found this argument annoying - the way-back machine is watching you no matter what you do anyways.

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Chris Ballance — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:24:02 -0000

Twitter itself has been a case study in scalability issues since their beginning.

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Josh Haley — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:55:00 -0000

That's pretty egregious stuff.

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Jesse Stay — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:08:00 -0000

Ari, great article - you should have added Google to that list as well. I usually just use Google to do my Twitter search, using "site:Twitter.com" - it has been much more effective than search.twitter.com

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Jose Sandoval — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:07:41 -0000

I think we are forgetting that implementing a good search engine takes quite lot of effort. Twitter will need more than an handful of PHP/Scala (or whatever they use) developers to come even close to a fraction of what google can do. A deal would make sense at this point. Of course, if Twitter has the money, they should grow it inside. But Twitter doesn't have that much time to be messing around.

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Daniel Tunkelang — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:07:39 -0000

I haven't had the kindest words for Twitter Search: http://thenoisychannel.com/...

But I think some of the comments here are overkill. I use Twitter search regularly as an alerting service for a broad vanity query. It works reasonably well, and I've learned to live with the glitches as part of what comes along with a free service. Could they do a lot better? For sure, and I've blogged about that. But what they have now is nonetheless useful.

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

BarbaraKB — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:01:14 -0000

Good for "right now" responses is Twitter's beauty. And maybe that's all Twitter search will ever be, although I hold out hope for more, like you.

Louis, you're the one who keeps bringing up FriendFeed whenever critiquing Twitter, not me. I see them as two complementary, but vastly different, social tools. FriendFeed competes w/ Facebook, not Twitter.

Peace!

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Ari Herzog — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:56:00 -0000

Have you seen the review of other search engines I wrote at http://mashable.com/2009/04... yet?

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

kosso — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:49:02 -0000

True, but I think they've just been busy integrating the results in to the main interface.

But one thing that really bugs me is that they still keep deleted tweets in the results. When I delete a tweet, for whatever reason, I want it deleted. (Rather like the stories around yesterday about photos not being deleted) - It just seems they don't re-index things much, if at all. They just sit across 'the firehose', suck it all in and that's it.

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Louis Gray — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:05:49 -0000

Barbara, the fact that it is not stable, and that I couldn't find basic things I was looking for absolutely diminishes its usefulness as a search engine. How can you say that falsely declaring no results or flat-out failures doesn't diminish it? What we know is that it is good for "right now" responses, but anything deeper, and you're dead.

As for FriendFeed vs. Twitter, that's not this article. I've already written that one a few times. The good news is that FriendFeed has a viable, true, searchable index.

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Louis Gray — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:03:55 -0000

If Twitter were going back to the well for more money, I would hope they could prove that "this time" they could scale and meet growth requirements. If they cannot, they need to come clean on what we can expect from the service, and what we should not expect.

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Louis Gray — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:02:39 -0000

The "removing tweets on request" issue is a tough one. The tendency would be to blame the user for some ill-sent tweets. Just like Google won't remove a page you wish would go away, I think the current usage pattern is fine.

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Louis Gray — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:00:58 -0000

I agree with your comments on Twitter's cloak of secrecy being a huge issue. Were they hoping nobody would notice their search engine had been deprecated? A quick note saying "Hey! We're more popular than ever and struggling to keep up, so we're limiting searches to the last two weeks" would be absolutely acceptable, and the grumbling would be lighter.

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Jerome Paradis — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:54:12 -0000

Even if it worked well, there is some flexibility missing in their search.

For example, on twitter.com, we cannot search profile information. Only user names, first name, last name. As a user, I was trying to find out someone I had followed but forget the name but could not do any search based on the information I remembered.

I see Twitter search like a proof of concept. It has lot of potential but it can't be fully exploited yet.

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Vinko — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:19:07 -0000

Let the principle of Default behaviour prevail http://tr.im/m6p6

Re: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

Daniel J. Pritchett — Fri, 22 May 2009 09:56:16 -0000

I'm glad you did show the superior FF search as a counterpoint to Twitter's latest folly. That kept me nodding along throughout the article. FF search is extremely powerful and I still find myself using it several times a day - mostly as a supplement to my hazy memory of interesting things people have said in the past.