The Future of Search: Social Relevancy Rank

FriendFeed has recently launched a search feature, and so Facebook search must be coming soon.

Real-time Web search (of streams of activities) is a hot topic right now. Everyone, including Google and Microsoft, recognizes the value of using trusted contacts as filters. What was once called social search is now called real-time search, but this time it will really happen. First, it will be applied to streams and then to the Web in general.

What we are about to get is a Social Relevancy Rank. Whenever you search streams of activity, the results will be ordered not chronologically but by how relevant each is to you based on your social graph. That is, people who matter more to you will bubble up. How does this work? Well, there will be a formula, just as there is a formula for Page Rank.

Solution 101: Rank by Friends and People You Follow

Here is an idea so obvious that it is surprising Twitter has not implemented it already: front-load search results with people you follow. When you search for, say, "Wilco" on Twitter today, the results are in the chronological order. That is not really relevant because you do not know who most of these people are. But if instead you could see people you follow, the search results would be much more useful.

This is not possible on Twitter today, but it already works great on FriendFeed. There, results are filtered or ranked based your social graph. This is not difficult for FriendFeed to do because, on the one hand, it knows who you care about and, on the other, it applies its advanced feed search technology to your social graph:

This sounds awesome, but there is a problem. "Wilco" works well as a query because the band has just released a new album, but many other queries would return no results. Simply put, your friends on Facebook and people you follow on Twitter can't possibly have an opinion on every topic you may be interested in. This is a problem of sparse data: trusted opinions are scarce.

Small Worlds and Taste Neighbors

To solve the problem of sparse data, we need more data... obviously. One possible solution is to incorporate other sources that you trust (i.e. broaden your social graph). As a next step, search results could rank people you may not be directly following but who are being followed by people you follow. Or in Facebook-speak, friends of friends. You could argue that you are not familiar with their opinions and so cannot yet trust them, but given the small world phenomenon, their contributions are often just as valuable.

Another step could be to include people with similar tastes, so-called taste neighbors. This approach is common among vertical social networks such as Last.fm, Flixster, and Goodreads. These networks have ideas about which people, other than your friends, are like you. However, this is a costly calculation and takes time. In order for Twitter to do something like this, it would have to compare people based on links or perform semantic analyses of tweets over time. Yet even though this is a difficult problem, it will be solved in time.

The Influencers and the Crowd

Aside from using the "second degree" of your social graph or taste neighbors, a Social Relevancy Rank could front-load influencers. In the absence of any other metric, someone who is followed by hundreds of thousands of users is likely more relevant to you than someone you don't know at all. Using number of followers as a weight might be a good way to order the rest of the activity stream.

In general, combing through countless tweets from strangers is not terribly useful anyway. Just as people have stopped looking at anything beyond the first page of results on Google, sifting through pages of tweets in chronological order gets tedious quickly. What needs to be incorporated into the Social Relevancy Rank is the aggregate sentiment of the crowd: a score that tells you yay or nay and gives you an opportunity to drill into more results if you choose.

The Quest for the Perfect Filter

There is no such thing as a perfect formula. Even Page Rank isn't perfect. Yet we all use it and find it useful. Much as Page Rank has been adapted and tuned to search the web, Social Relevancy Rank will evolve over time to help us make sense of endless streams of activity. This ranking will have a profound impact on how we tap into our friends' opinions.

It will change the face of general Web searches in time, too. Today, results are automatically ranked by relevancy and freshness. Once Social Relevancy Rank is factored in, search results will be re-ordered based on social relevancy.

Related articles:

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/technorati-to-launch-twittorati.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-unveils-new-search-features.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/twitter-search-to-index-pages-and.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/yahoo-upgrades-search-engine.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/search-sucks-and-microsoft-is-almost.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/searching-for-meaning-of-bing.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/microsoft-must-buy-twitter-msft.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/ballmer-on-bing-economy-and-more.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/china-google-and-pornography.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-they-might-be-little-evil.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/wolfram-alpha-has-google-attention.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/26-people-who-mislead-you-on-twitter.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/ballmer-all-traditional-content-will-be.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/rate-of-tweets-per-second-doubles.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-unveils-sms-service-for-africa.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/yahoo-ceo-stop-comparing-us-to-google.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/future-of-facebook-usernames.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/googles-schmidt-rips-microsofts-bing.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/history-and-future-of-computer-memory.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/kosmix-tries-to-avoid-google-search.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/dispute-finder-intel-program-finds.html

Source:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/future_of_search_social_relevancy_rank.php

Tags:

FriendFeed search feature, Facebook search, real-time Web search, Google, Twitter, Twitter search, PageRank, Microsoft, trusted contacts as filters, social search, Global IT News, Social Relevancy Rank, metrics,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Five More Search Tools You Should Know

Have you ever needed to see the search results for another city — maybe because you want to see what PPC ads are shown somewhere else?

Have you ever needed to see search results from a different country, or in a different language? Maybe you’re into real time search, and you’d love a place to find the latest photos and videos being shared on Twitter. Or perhaps you’re planning a vacation abroad, but you’re not sure when is the best time to visit Europe.

It’s time again for another roundup of the latest and greatest search tools and search engines, and in this article, I’ll share five such sites that will answer the above questions (and more). This is the fourth in my occasional series profiling under-the-radar search tools. Links to the previous three are at the end of this article.

SearchMuffin

Look, I don’t name ‘em, I just use ‘em and write about ‘em if they’re cool. And this one is SearchMuffin has a simple premise: Type in a keyword and choose a city from the dropdown menu, and it’ll show you the Google search results that match. Think of it as a sort of geo-targeted competitive research/PPC research tool. It’s about the easiest way I know of to see the PPC ads that appear in other cities.

And best of all, it’s not just limited to major U.S. cities; at the moment, there are 262 choices in the dropdown menu, including such non-metropolises as Roseville, California, and Arvada, Colorado. (No disrespect intended to Rosevillites and Arvadians.)

Glearch

Let’s expand our horizons beyond 262 U.S. cities. What if you needed to quickly see some search results from other countries and/or other languages? Glearch (again, I don’t name ‘em) is an international meta search engine that lets you search by country, by language, and/or by search engine. You can take those three options and customize each to build just the query you want.

Roooby

We’ve written a fair amount about real time search in the past few months, but we haven’t focused too much on the visual element — people posting photos and videos of what they’re doing now. Roooby is one of several real time search engines that capture media, but one of the few that surface both photos and videos. (Although, to be frank, Roooby could do a better job of finding videos by scanning sites such as Qik.com, TwitVid.io, and others that host live video.)

Roooby isn’t the only player in this space. TwitCaps, TwitPicGrid, Pingwire, and Twicsy offer similar real time image search engines.

Spezify

Speaking of media and images, here’s the most visual search tool I’ve ever seen: Spezify. The best way I can describe it is a sort of visual meta search engine. It pulls in results from Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and even eBay and Amazon to create a fairly stunning search results page.

This is serious eye candy. There’s a settings page where you can choose the sources and types of content (images, text, video) you want included. But to be frank, the focus on visuals means the search results have no context whatsoever. You can move vertically and horizontally through the results, but you have no idea why you’re seeing what you’re seeing. It’s innovative to be sure, but for this searcher, it’s too lacking in functionality.

Joobili

Finally, here’s one for our readers in Europe, or for our readers traveling to Europe. It’s called Joobili, and it’s a travel/event search engine with a twist: Rather than telling the search engine what you want to do or where you want to go, you tell it when. There’s a cool date-based slider on the home page to get you started, and once you’re in the results, Joobili lets you see results based on categories (Arts, Sport, Nature, etc.), by country, or by keyword.

If you create an account, Joobili will let you save events to a wish list or a “went” list. You can also rank events to help other users make decisions on what to do and where to go. It’s a clever approach, but as I hinted above, it only covers Europe.

Related articles:

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/technorati-to-launch-twittorati.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-unveils-new-search-features.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/twitter-search-to-index-pages-and.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/yahoo-upgrades-search-engine.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/search-sucks-and-microsoft-is-almost.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/searching-for-meaning-of-bing.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/microsoft-must-buy-twitter-msft.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/ballmer-on-bing-economy-and-more.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/china-google-and-pornography.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-they-might-be-little-evil.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/wolfram-alpha-has-google-attention.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/26-people-who-mislead-you-on-twitter.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/ballmer-all-traditional-content-will-be.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/rate-of-tweets-per-second-doubles.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-unveils-sms-service-for-africa.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/yahoo-ceo-stop-comparing-us-to-google.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/future-of-facebook-usernames.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/googles-schmidt-rips-microsofts-bing.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/history-and-future-of-computer-memory.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/kosmix-tries-to-avoid-google-search.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/dispute-finder-intel-program-finds.html

Source:

http://searchengineland.com/five-more-search-tools-july09-22766

Tags:

TwitCaps, TwitPicGrid, Pingwire, Twicsy, real time image search engines, Spezify, SearchMuffin, Glearch, Joobili, Roooby, real-time Web search, Google, Twitter search, PageRank, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, eBay, Amazon, Qik.com, TwitVid.io,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Technorati to Launch Twittorati

Apparently, Technorati is still going. The seven-year-old blog index site once threatened to be to the web’s nascent conversational search paradigm what Twitter Search is now, but has limped along for the last couple of years - plagued by server downtime, broken links, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Blog Search’s rise and the overtaking of blogging by social networking and microblogging in the tech fashion stakes.

So now it’s launching Twittorati, an attempt to have some of Twitter’s magic rub off on it. Somewhat confusingly, it’s a feed of tweets from Technorati’s Top 100 listed bloggers, complete with its own list of most popular hashtags. The idea appears to be providing an on-ramp to Twitter streams from the “highest authority” bloggers...

CEO Richard Jalichandra blogs (and tweets): “This is where the Blogosphere meets the Twittersphere. Twittorati shows what top bloggers are tweeting about, and how these trends compare to Blogosphere trends.” But will web users care for such a service any more than Technorati itself, which, while denying being overtaken by tweets, must otherwise be lamenting the splintering of blogs in to 140-character messages…

Jalichandra: “We’re asked all the time how platforms like Twitter and Facebook are impacting the Blogosphere. This is what we’re seeing: Twitter is not replacing blogs, but it has evolved as a major awareness vehicle for bloggers and people who read blogs (same goes for Facebook status updates).”

Related Articles:

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/twitter-best-practices.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/first-twitter-arrest.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/microsoft-must-buy-twitter-msft.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/300-things-id-like-to-see-from-twitter.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-plus-twitter-equals-motherlode.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-vp-on-twitter.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/twitter-co-founder-we-have-made-it-when.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/twitter-users-join-psychic-powers-study.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/what-twitter-traffic-flat-must-be.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/twitter-sees-tools-not-ads-for-revenue.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/dell-is-monetizing-twitter.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/twitter-trips-on-its-rapid-growth.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/us-asks-twitter-to-stay-online-because.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/china-silences-twitter-bing-yahoo.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/another-cause-for-concern-at-twitter.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/san-francisco-links-311-call-center-to.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/norway-central-bank-to-twitter-interest.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/26-people-who-mislead-you-on-twitter.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/twitter-fastest-growing-brand.html

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/internet-service-providers-not-keeping.html

Source: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-technorati-seeks-some-twitter-juice-launching-twittorati/

26 People Who Mislead You On Twitter

Earlier this month, I covered various ways people are spamming Twitter in my Twitter’s Real Time Spam Problem article. Since then, I’ve been diligently reporting some of the more annoying spam I see. Despite this, none of the reported accounts have been closed. So, it’s time for a public spam report — and some education along the way.

Public spam reports suck because often they just bring traffic to the company or individuals who were spamming in the first place. Nevertheless, I figure it’s worthwhile to do in this case to properly illustrate the problem.

Let’s do the name and shame part first (I won’t link to the accounts, but people can visit them directly):

AdaCardwell

AmazingMoney

AmazingProfits

AmazinTwitties

AmberMoore48

bizpromotion

ChristineSnider

EmilyBrown13

EricaEsau

EvaJimmerson

ExpertMoney

HeidiSomarriba

JaneDDavis

JaniceAnderson

JoannaHill23

GloriaHayes

KimberlyCheek

KristiHernandez

Melinda_Martin

NetworkPromoter

onlinmarket

PaidPerTweets

Priscilla_Ortiz

socialclicks

SusanMccartney

RichOffAdsense

I’ve spotted all of these people — technically Twitter accounts, it could be one person running them all — tweeting links that don’t match the content of what they’re talking about.

Let’s take AdaCardwell, who recently tweeted this:

Devver Promises To Speed Up App Testing For Ruby Frameworks - http://rubyurl.com/…

Interesting, right? And I especially liked the use of the RubyURL shortener to make it seem even more legit. Well done, sir, well done. I’ve killed the actual link, so that I’m not giving any direct benefit to some pay-per-tweet program or affiliate along the way. It doesn’t lead to the “real” article or anything that matches the content of the tweet.

Instead, it leads me over to some supposed blog tips site. But then the trip is interrupted with an ad for another site, and you in turn get redirected to it. This other site is pitching a social “blasting” tool that no doubt helps other people do all the misleading crap that Ada is doing. Where is the “real” article, by the way? Five days ago, TechCrunch IT tweeted the “original” tweet:

techcrunchit: Devver Promises To Speed Up App Testing For Ruby Frameworks http://tcrn.ch/4IL by @leenarao

Part of the bait-and-switch for Twitter spammers is to grab a “real” tweet like this and simply swap the URL with something else. My Twitter’s Real Time Spam Problem article has some further illustrations of this. Earlier, I’d said I’d reported these accounts. That’s pretty easy to do. You follow @spam on Twitter. You’ll immediately get followed back. Then you can send a direct message with the spam report.

I’ve been doing that for two weeks now. Some of the accounts above, I’ve reported twice or three times. It’s done nothing. They remain active. Close them down, Twitter.

I know, I know. They’ll just come back. Hopefully, as I covered in my earlier article, Twitter will find a more automated way of stemming them. Certainly keeping them out of Twitter Search reduces the impact they have. And if Twitter can’t do it, then check out Clean Tweets, a Firefox add-on that helps (and see our review, Clean Tweets: New Add-On Zaps Twitter Spam).

As for those doing this type of misleading tweeting, you’re almost certainly too young to remember when in 1999, the US Federal Trade Commission took action against a site that was spamming search engines with listings that appeared to be about things like kids games but instead lead to porn. The FTC deemed that misleading advertising and shut them down. You sure you want the FTC potentially coming after you?

Source: http://searchengineland.com/26-people-who-mislead-you-on-twitter-21561

Tags: Twitter search, Firefox, Twitter spam, Cleantweets, US Federal Trade Commission, Global Best Practice, Global IT News, Spam, List of Twitter spammers, Techcrunch, Ruby Frameworks,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Rate of Tweets Per Second Doubles

The sudden interest in the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett was apparently too much for Twitter’s search engine, which quickly got overloaded and returned results that were increasingly delayed—when it returned them at all.

Later Thursday evening, Twitter said it had disabled the search field on users’ home pages entirely, although it did not explain why. The troubles don’t bode well for Twitter’s prospects as a “real-time” search engine, which many believe is likely the service’s most valuable feature. Twitter executives have even hinted in the past that they want to expand the search engine to sift through not only posts on Twitter but also pages linked to by Twitter users.

But even before Thursday’s overload, the search engine had already been sharply criticized for being “broken.” Tweets often don’t show up in the results or are delayed in showing up.

A silver lining for Twitter, however: Big news days like Thursday reinforce that people do want to turn to Twitter for news. At one point Thursday afternoon, all 10 “trending search topics” were related to this week’s trio of celebrity deaths, with Ed McMahon still getting attention.

Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard’s Berkman Center For Law and Society tweeted that his “search scripts” showed that about 15 percent of all Tweets mentioned Jackson—levels that had not been reached with either “Iran” or “Swine Flu.” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone also tells the LA Times that the news led to an instant doubling of tweets per second.

“This particular news about the passing of such a global icon is the biggest jump in tweets per second since the U.S. presidential election,” he said. As for the service’s troubles, Stone acknowledged that there were “reports of slowness” and the company was acting “right away” to improve it.

Source: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-twitter-search-fails-under-thursdays-celebrity-news-rush

Tags: Biz Stone, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Twitter’s search engine, Twitter search, tweets per second doubles, Ethan Zuckerman, Harvard’s Berkman Center For Law and Society, Global IT News, LA Times, Ed McMahon,

Posted via email from Global Business News