[twitter, tech] Twitter search now broken?

[siderea]

Until sometime in the last day or two, I could go to Twitter, not logged in, and put "siderea.livejournal.com" in the search bar. Under the "Top" (default) tab I would get a nonsensical result: a single tweet from 2009 that had a link to my journal, with no favorites or retweets, by someone with 600 followers

Comments

[alierak]

Twitter Help Center - Search

[siderea]

Thanks!

[dougo]

Probably related to this?
https://blog.twitter.com/express-even-more-in-140-characters

[siderea]

*shrug* Doesn't seem directly connected, but maybe some change in Twitter's code has borked indexing?

[dougo]

I was thinking, maybe now they take URLs out of the tweet text completely, and they're only in metadata, which is not searched? Not that this helps you, but it might explain the timing.

[ron_newman]

And if I do an Advanced Search for All of these words: siderea livejournal, I get only three tweets.

[dr_tectonic]

My guess is that it was a transient bug giving "top" results instead of "live". I just searched for your journal and under "live" got a reverse-chronological listing of tweets that mention your journal.

As I understand it, top tweets are those that "catch the attention of other users". So I think you get only a single result for the top tweets search because that's the only tweet mentioning your LJ URL that exceeds some magic algorithmic threshold (probably in this case based on the tweeter's high number of followers).

[siderea]

I just searched for your journal and under "live" got a reverse-chronological listing of tweets that mention your journal.

Huh. It's still not working for me! (21:24 -0400). I did a force-reload of the page, too, to overide the cache, but I think I've seen a thing where async javascript calls (which I suspect this is) manage to get cached in some other way, and force-reloading it doesn't actually refresh that.

So I think you get only a single result for the top tweets search because that's the only tweet mentioning your LJ URL that exceeds some magic algorithmic threshold (probably in this case based on the tweeter's high number of followers).That's what makes no sense: 600 readers is nothing. I have made Metafilter, the Guardian, HackerNews, and others with tens and hundreds of thousands of readers. There's no way that that one tweet, which is seriously not that interesting or viral, is getting more views than, say, most of the tweets mentioning The Asshole Filter or Class (American). ETA: I mean, Ive seen tweets recommending

[dr_tectonic]

It's very old, but this article talks about the top tweets algorithm not favoring large follower counts, but being based on "highest velocity beyond expectations".

http://searchengineland.com/twitter-how-our-new-top-tweets-works-39115

So probably there's just something fluky about how that one user's (comparatively few, it seems) followers interacted with the tweet that caught the algorithm's attention. Like maybe a bunch of them coincidentally all clicked on it in a very short window, or something. (Or maybe the data in the database is wonky...)

[moof]

I'll try to figure out who to ask on Tuesday; they've been mucking about with search and logged-out quite a bit as of late.

What I suspect is happening is what dougo said in their second comment: that the original URL might not be saved, and it's not bothering to search all the t.co link referents.

[siderea]

Sweet, thanks! I did submit a bug report as per alierak's link, but I had to point them back here because 500 characters was not enough to explain the problem or steps to reproduce, so I'm not sure anyone will follow up on it. I do hope they decide the functionality is important enough to support that they're willing to fix it. I suspect there's a lot of users, including indirection ones via social reputation management tools/services that use the API, who want it.

It would also be nice, as a side note, if they figured out why the "Top" result is so wacky. I can't imagine what I've been seeing is the functionality they envisioned.

[moof]

KingTwitFisher raised the issue before I could; there appears to be vigorous internal discussion about how search and top should work. (Alas, I have no insight on what the desired behavior is supposed to look like.)

[siderea]

Ah-ha! Thanks for the update.