Twitter Search By Authority
Loic Le Meur proposes that we need a “search by authority” feature for Twitter and then recommends that number of followers be used as an indication of that authority. Michael Arrington agrees.
Both took some heat for this proposal. Most of it seemed to revolve around the idea that authority equals number of followers, but I think the discussion is more interesting than that one issue.
I can think of at least four questions this raises.
Do we need to filter search results at all?
I think the answer is yes – sometimes.
Gary Arndt comments
Microblogging doesn’t lend itself to search. Period.
I agree, but I think he is overstating a bit. A Twitter search is not the place to do in depth research on a topic, but the fact that the results are “all over the map” doesn’t mean that one can’t find useful results. The timeliness of the results alone can be very useful. There is simply no doubt about this.
Several commenters pointed out that we should all just enjoy Twitter the way it is. I understand the argument here but there is nothing wrong with discussing new ideas and improvements to existing technology. I enjoy Twitter the way it is and plan to use it the way it is, but I don’t mind that others would like to make it more useful.
Most of the time, I want my Twitter search to return more results than I can possibly process. There may be times, however, that I’d rather filter out some results. Having a mechanism to remove those results voluntarily is always a good thing. I use the minus operator all the time to narrow down my searches. If I could filter based on other criteria voluntarily, that would be great too.
Should we filter based on authority?
I hesitate to answer this honestly because I think many of you will stop reading here,
but I think the answer is yes.
When I read Loic’s post the other day I was as irritated with his tone as many of you, but I do think his point is a valid one. What he was recommending, according to his clarifying comments, is an option to filter based on authority. While I might not use this feature as much as some, I think it’s a good idea.
I tend to agree with Steven Walling who comments
for many, many people, the point of Twitter search is to find things said about a topic of interest regardless of how influential the person speaking is.
and Joe Duck, who adds
In fact I think it would be interesting to reverse the algo you suggest – I’d rather hear from some Grandmas in Peoria about their iPhone experiences than from Jason Calacanis about [groan] the wonders of Mahalo.
I could not agree more with these two comments. Our family had so much fun on the night of Hillary Clinton’s concession speech.* Terri and I both punched slightly different search criteria into Twitter Search and we read some of the more interesting (and family friendly) comments aloud. It was a good time had by all. None of us cared one bit if the people spouting off had any kind of authority at all. That wasn’t the point.
I may not be interested in search by authority, but I understand why some people want “authority” opinions on a topic from time to time. Some of these might be egomaniacal, but that should not keep us from using an “authority search” for legitimate purposes, should it?
This brings us to the most difficult question of all – though perhaps the least interesting to me personally. 
How does one measure authority?
I think the verdict is clear from the weekend discussion – the number of followers is not a good measure of authority. Many people weighed in on this one but two comments sum it up for me:
And if authority is what we’re after I doubt if number of followers equates to authority. Too many really smart people have very few followers. -Dave Winer
Popularity does not equate to accuracy. If it did and Twitter existed 2000 years ago; the earth would still be flat. -Josh Jonte
As far as I’m concerned, that settles it. I’ve used Twitter since 2006 and my experience tells me that the number of followers is not a valid measure of authority.
Nitin Borwankar and Taylor Barr also touch on the problems with such an approach and hint at the possible solutions. I will have more to say about those later.
So, is there some other measure one can use to judge the “authority” of a tweet or twitter user? Scoble and others recommend we use some other metric – retweets, followers/following, someone even proposed
~= #followers/(#faved + #RTs)
My interest in finding the perfect formula for this is negligible but I do think that we’ve discovered one other measure that won’t work – retweets.
Once again, I think two comments sum it up best:
A sycophantic echo chamber is as stupid of a metric as # of followers. -T. Luoma
All these popularity contest-like sites and lists full of people echoing each other all the time just seems to take some of the original spirit away from Twitter. imho. -kosso
Michael Arrington points out that “This is exactly what Technorati does with blog search” and Robert Scoble points out that this is just what Google does. This, by itself, is reason to question it in my opinion.
Scoble goes on to point out that according to Google he is the number one result for “recession 2008” “How did that happen?” he asks.
Jeremy Zawodny points out a similar issue in 2003 and correctly (IMO) diagnoses the problem a few months later:
PageRank stopped working really well when people began to understand how PageRank worked. The act of Google trying to “understand” the web caused the web itself to change. -Jeremy Zawodny
I will pick up my thoughts on this tomorrow, but I do want to bring up the last question.
What other filter criteria might be useful?
It seems clear that at least some users would like to filter search results from time to time. What criteria would be useful to you?
* Terri and my daughter were huge supporters of Hillary Clinton. While my son and I supported Obama from the beginning, we would have wholeheartedly supported Hillary if she’d earned the nomination.