Thursday, November 19, 2009

Searching Twitter

I did a search for 'Auckland super city', which may not be all that imaginative, but is certainly topical with information about the boundaries and so on coming out today.

I found that the results obtained by searching Twitter's search engine and other 3rd party search engines were remarkably similar, except for my search in TweepSearch which didn't turn up any results at all. I guess this is because this search engine looks at profiles and biographies rather tweets themselves? I also searched on TweetGrid and Twazzup, with a result list which was pretty well identical to the original results from Twitter. Twazzup also showed the most popular links that had been put into tweets, and showed how many people had used them and how many times. The results mostly seemed to be informational, about the announcement that was made today, with links to sites like the NBR, and media organisations, rather than opinions on the super city. Most of the results were relevant as well, although one or two used the 3 terms in my search without actually being about the super city developments. This I guess is because Twitter assumes the word 'and' is between each search term unless you specify otherwise by grouping terms.

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