Twitter modifies real-time search algorithm

On April 2, Beijing time, Tencent Science and Technology News (compiled/northward) reported that, according to foreign media reports, following the launch of a new homepage recently, Twitter has recently improved its real-time search function. Besides timeliness, the popularity of search results will also be considered, and popular content will be displayed at the top of the search results first.

Previously, the new homepage of Twitter also began to display popular content. Twitter gets popular content based on the algorithm and decides which will be displayed on the home page. Now Twitter is beginning to incorporate popular features into search and APIs.

As shown in the figure below, the top three items in the search results are always displayed here, and the number of times the message is forwarded will be displayed below the content, indicating why the message is popular. Twitter pointed out that the fixed display of popular content is not always three. It may be less than this number, but not more than three.

Taylor Singletary, a Twitter developer, revealed some key information behind this popular content algorithm:

"We hope that through this new project, we can simultaneously retrieve the best Twitter messages about a topic based on timeliness and interactivity, thus making real-time search more valuable. This means that we should not only analyze the profile of the sender, but also consider how many times this message has been forwarded, collected, and replied. This algorithm will continue to evolve iteratively."

In addition, the functional improvement of real-time search will also be applied in the API. Singlitari said that at present, Twitter application developers can choose whether to enable this function, but it may eventually become the standard function of the search API.

If the developer applies this function in the API, the search results will be presented in the following ways:

--Mixed - Both popular and recent news are returned when searching. This will be the default configuration in the future.

--Hot News - Only the hot news will be returned when searching.

--Recent Messages - Only the most recent messages are returned when searching.

According to insiders, this function may make Twitter's real-time search more useful, while reducing the interference of spam.