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I had a fabulous geeky birthday Friday–I hung out and worked at an SF Jelly. This Friday’s Jelly included a talk by Eric Jensen (from Twitter Search @ej), Vik Singh (from Yahoo BOSS), and Rajat Mukherjee (Google Custom Search). The three companies had a search shown down and where twitter fit in the search game.

Google said that the main value of twitter to search is in Google aggregation of the URL’s embeded within tweets, hence using twitter results to increase authority of URLs found through it i.e. yet another metric that will go into page ranking on its search engine.

Yahoo was more interested in adding aggregated twitter buzz to existing published content such as news articles to make them fresher. Vic from Yahoo gave the following interesting statistic: “2-5% of queries on web search are breaking news queries. 40% of these would benefit from fresh data.”

Twitter on the other hand said there is no need to add search relevance to tweets as the fact that your friends, people you have chosen to follow are tweeting information the context is one of social value and was pre-decided with the choice to follow.

Makes sense considering history

Each company’s response makes a lot of sense the part of the customer problem each is trying to solve and the issues it deals with as it does so.

When the internet first started out from a user perspective it fundamentally changed how much information someone had access to and who had access to information at any one time. As grew we realized that we can manage the large amounts of information by social interests rather than individual interests, enter better search tools.

Google started out around this time with the mission to increase user search relevance. It didn’t take long for people to figure out how to artificially increase their search rankings. Since then Google has continously been combatting such spamming in new and better ways. Coupling embedded tweet URLs with other page rank algorithm factors is just another tool with which it can do this. For Google tweets are just another social way of increasing authority to get to better user relevance of search results.

Boss is Yahoo’s open search web services platform for developers building new search solutions. They are obviously more interested in helping search in non-search engine content sites on the web. For them using fresh twitter content and buzz to enhance content makes perfect sense.

Facebook took the social interest based galvinization of content to another level by giving us standard online identities and increase casual, phatic communications. Twitter took this to another level by making it easy and common for us to share minute by minute short communications. Twitter is all about the social interaction of following and retweeting. As Eric said twitter search does not need to provide context since the followers are the context. This is definitely the case if twitter is only about more and faster casual communications between those you are twitter friends with or take time to build twitterships with.

However Twitter has the potential to be a complete game changer that takes us beyond a medium for casual communication to one of improving how we mobilize learning and resources.

How twitter can be a game changer

As the world gets more and more competitive; how we progress as professionals, as individuals, and as a society depends on being able to connect with others who will help us become better at all aspects of our lives. This theme forms the basis of the next book John Hagel is working on.

I strongly believe that twitter has the ability to be a powerful player in this space. It has content from experts, leading edge thinkers across a variety of industries. Retweets are great but a string search gives me tweets that happen close to the time of search. It becomes hard to distinguish the social capital of a person over time from this basic data if I don’t follow them. I can’t quickly and easily see who is the best at what they do and who will help me be a better me in my career, in my life, and in my community. This is where better search would come in.

It could help me determine the authority and relevance of tweets from people I may not be following. The solution would be an integration of some 3rd party apps that currently provide fragments of this solution:

-what this person tweets on: from a search of their bio line and recent tweets. I used to think Tweet Top had some version of this, but on further research I am under the impression that Tweet Top’s topic experts were hand picked (please let me know if I am wrong).

-how often this person is retweeted: Microplaza, which I blogged about as a blog reading management tool some time back, helps you see tweets that have been retweeted across your twitter network or the twitter public timeline.

If you combine the above and show them on twitter search results instead of the current string search you will help people find, follow, learn from, connect with, and collaborate with the popular and the bleeding edge. This will take our thought process to deeper thoughts and connections between ideas, the place where creativity and transformative innovation lies.

My recommendations for twitter

When I asked Eric Jensen about the above feature he smiled and said that he would imagine that this is something being worked on. That’s ok Eric. You don’t have to tell me. But if that’s really what your doing I am uber excited for where this will take us. If your not, please think about this. For if you do something like this you will permanently change how we think, what we think about, and who we think about it with in deeper ways then anything we have seen before.

For everyone else

Do let me know what you think. I spend a lot of time thinking about these things and am very interested in building social networking tools to help us learn how to be better in all aspects of life. My prelaunch startup founderShack is one of my contributions towards this goal but I have many other ideas here. Interested? Have ideas of your own? Let’s talk! @traffichoney

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