Slashdot Mirror
Google Partners With Twitter For Search
An anonymous reader writes "According to the Google blog, it has partnered up with Twitter to bring tweets into its search results in the next few months. While this is exciting news, how the feature is going to present itself is a huge question. Indiblogger presents a comprehensive list of how it should be. From the article, the points discussed are: relevance of tweets with the search term, twitter and Google advertising, even a Google-Twitter API."
The funniest part is the news articles presenting the Bing partnership as an exclusive one.
Bet Steve's tossing chairs now.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
I think it twitter search would also be useful to anyone managing a product or project being used publicly. Being able to find mentions on twitter would allow one to be more proactive in dealing with issues and also help find happy customers/users more quickly.
I had a gripe about adobe air on linux a while back and posted about it on twitter. Within minutes I was contacted by two Adobe developers and they helped me file a bug report. That was the first time I saw a real opportunity for twitter to be something more than a way to keep in touch with friends.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I can see this being immediately useful for news searching, as tweets tend to be an extremely fast source for breaking news in all fields. Twitter has also been useful for finding interesting articles on topics relevant to my interests (security, IT and a bit of politics), so tapping this could open up a lot of information previously hidden behind Twitter's walls.
Exactly. I was upset enough when spammy blogs with duplicate content filled my search results, but now I wave to deal with one-line tweets, too? Ugh.
Put identity in the browser.
Honestly, given the nature of the site and the kind of communication it promotes, I wonder whether there is any *original* information that can be found in there. I mean, great scientists, philosophers and artists did exchange letters in the past, but even if we're talking about some real geniuses, I don't see how the "tweet" format can ever contain anything more than shit. It's not easy to convey a properly argumented original thought in 160 characters... So, in the end I don't see why anyone would care to search tweeter data at all. Other maybe for the purpose of some obscure IgNobel-worthy research or in the case of stalkers following the hot star of the moment (when exactly did she pee? that is the question...).
P.
I see I am not in disagreement with anyone as to the additional clutter that this will likely add to our search results. It seems that Google continuously piles more straw on the metaphorical haystack, leaving the few needles of information I seek buried ever deeper. The thing is that all those pieces of straw really have strings attached in the form of metadata. Google knows - or should know - where all the pages they index come from. They should be able to relatively easily categorize those sites as manufacturer's sites, shopping sites, news sites, magazine sites, truly educational sites, blogs, forums, etc. But it seems Google cuts all those strings when they pile the indexed pages into the haystack leaving me to sort through them manually. Isn't that what we invented computers for? If they would simply leave the strings attached and allow users to "pull them" then we could simply choose not to receive results from shopping sites or whatever. As it is, looking for a manufacturer's specifications on something can be maddening because of all the shopping sites that come up instead. (Remember, one does not always know the URL to a manufacturer's web site.)
In effect, I wish Google would institute a system wherein we could check off or uncheck which types of sites we would like to receive search results from.
P.S. What the heck is wrong with this text edit box. The text cursor only shows up when I hover the mouse over some portions of the text in this box. When I hover over other portions the regular pointer cursor is displayed. If I click when that pointer is displayed it does not place the cursor into that location in the text. Instead it selects the box within the HTML and typing does not go into the box (the box does not have focus). This is a real pain. The code on Slashdot is getting worse with every revision. Geez, it even prevents me from selecting text in some locations even if I have already started the selection drag. This is insane! Please bring back the old editor.