Twitter + BOSS = Real Time Search

Try it: yahoo

Update: (6/25) This application has been updated. Go here to learn more. The description below though still applies.

Update: (6/11) In case you’re bored, here’s a discussion we had with Google and Twitter about Open & Real-time Search.

Update: (1/19) If you have issues try again in 5-10 minutes. You can also check out the screenshots below. (1/15) App Engine limits were reached (and fast). Appreciate the love and my apologies for not fully anticipating that. Google was nice enough though to temporarily raise the quota for this application. Anyways, this was more to show a cool BOSS developer example using code libraries I released earlier, but there might be more here. Stay tuned.

Here’s a screenshot as well (which should hopefully be stale by the time you read this).

Basically this service boosts Yahoo’s freshest news search results (which typically don’t have much relevance since they are ordered by timestamp and that’s it) based on how similar they are to the emerging topics found on Twitter for the same query (hence using Twitter to determine authority for content that don’t yet have links because they are so fresh). It also overlays related tweets via an AJAX expando button (big thanks to Greg Walloch at Yahoo! for the design) under results if they exist. A nice added feature to the overlay functionality is near-duplicate removal to ensure message threads on any given result provide as much comment diversity as possible.

Freshness (especially in the context of search) is a challenging problem. Traditional PageRank style algorithms don’t really work here as it takes time for a fresh URL to garner enough links to beat an older high ranking URL. One approach is to use cluster sizes as a feature for measuring the popularity of a story (i.e. Google News). Although quite effective IMO this may not be fast enough all the time. For the cluster size to grow requires other sources to write about the same story. Traditional media can be slow however, especially on local topics. I remember when I saw breaking Twitter messages describing the California Wildfires. When I searched Google/Yahoo/Microsoft right at that moment I barely got anything (< 5 results spanning 3 search results pages). I had a similar episode when I searched on the Mumbai attacks. Specifically, the Twitter messages were providing incredible focus on the important subtopics that had yet to become popular in the traditional media and news search worlds. What I found most interesting in both of these cases was that news articles did exist on these topics, but just weren’t valued highly enough yet or not focusing on the right stories (as the majority of tweets were). So why not just do that? Order these fresh news articles (which mostly provide authority and in-depth coverage) based on the number of related fresh tweets as well as show the tweets under each. That’s this service.

To illustrate the need, here’s a quick before and after shot. I searched for ‘nba’ using Yahoo’s news search ordered by latest results (first image). Very fresh (within a minute) but subpar quality. The first result talks about teams that are in a different league of basketball than the NBA. However, search for ‘nba’ on TweetNews (second image) and you get the Kings/Warriors triple OT game highlight which was buzzing more in Twitter at that minute.

'NBA' on Y! News latest enhanced by Twitter — 'NBA' on TweetNews

There’s something very interesting here … Twitter as a ranking signal for search freshness may prove to be very useful if constructed properly. Definitely deserves more exploration – hence this service, which took < 100 lines of code to represent all the search logic thanks to Yahoo! BOSS, Twitter’s API, and the BOSS Mashup Framework.

To sum up, the contributions of this service are: (1) Real-time search + freshness (2) Stitching social commentary to authoritative sources of information (3) Another (hopefully cool) BOSS example.

The code is packaged for general open consumption and has been ported to run on App Engine (which powers this service actually). You can download all the source here.