#freeseo Summary with Real-Time Search Case Study
July 2nd, 2009 12:00 am
I have an issue with the current state of realtime search. The one hang-up I have with this new type of search engine is that you can not mine the Twitter database for past results. Maybe one day I want to give a gift to the first person who mentioned my brand or product. Or what if I was interested in learning who started the #followfriday trend using Twitter search. Currently, even Advanced Twitter Search is a failure. I attempted to mine Twitter's database for the hash tag #freeseo from February of this year through today. The result set only showed two of the twelve tweets that mentioned #freeseo. With the $55 million in funding they have, I hope we will see a better Twitter search engine in the near future.
Here is the table with all of the #freeseo tweets to date. Note that the first tweet in the list is the most recent. The following tweets were exported using Tweetake.
| # | Status Date | #freeseo Tweet Content |
| 1 | Jun 01 | #freeseo obtain quality links. submit your business website to internet directories such as http://bit.ly/idirs |
| 2 | May 22 | #freeseo /relevant-or-related-keyword-directory-names/ #seo |
| 3 | May 07 | #freeseo <h1><a href="page-pointing-to-itself">relevant keyword page title</a></h1> #seo |
| 4 | Apr 22 | #freeseo the content inside the html <title> element should not be exactly the same as the content inside the html <meta> element. #seo |
| 5 | Apr 14 | #freeseo use relevant keywords with < IMG ALT= attribute. example: < IMG SRC=image-file-name.jpg ALT="relevant image keywords" /> #seo |
| 6 | Apr 09 | #freeseo the html < title > tag is one of the strongest #seo factors. example: < title >unique page title with relevant keywords< /title > |
| 7 | Apr 06 | #freeseo domain name CAN be one of the strongest variables. example: yourbrandpluskeyword.com #seo |
| 8 | Mar 30 | #freeseo use-dashes-NOT_underscores_to-separate-keywords-in-file-names. example: good-keyword-topic.htm #seo |
| 9 | Mar 27 | #freeseo the search engine bot reads the document from top to bottom. #seo http://twitpic.com/2hq8i |
| 10 | Mar 26 | #freeseo relevant content is KING! #seo 101 |
| 11 | Mar 25 | #freeseo make sure the search engine bots can READ your code. http://validator.w3.org #seo |
| 12 | Mar 23 | eventually i will teach everyone #freeseo. when i have time. precious time it is. only 14hrs for me to engineer internet. ONLY 14hrs. |
I decided to do a little case study of the Twitter search engines. I entered the queries #freeseo and freeseo into the relevant realtime search engines just to see if there was any variation in the results. I believe the obscurity of the terms "#freeseo" and "freeseo" is important. Since the number of tweets that mention these terms is limited, we may deduce logic for how these different realtime search engines function based on the results.
| Twitter Realtime Search Engine #freeseo Results | ||||||||||
| Query | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J |
| #freeseo | 2 | 0 | 1U | 0 | 2 | 2* | 2 | 1 | 0 | 1L | 2 | 0 |
| freeseo | 2 | 11 | 0 | 1U | 0 | 2 | 11 | 3* | 7 | 2 | 11 | 1 | 8 | 0 | 1L | 2 | 11 | 0 |
The first number indicates results with the #freeseo hashtag. The second number indicates the total number of tweets in the result set. Where only one number is shown, the total number of tweets resulted in all #freeseo hashtag tweets. U represents a tweet by the user @freeseo. L represents a tweet by a user that mentioned FREESEO in a passed url. Something interesting happened with the *.
A - Twitter Search
B - Flaptor Twitter Search
C - OneRiot Realtime Search
D - Scoopler Realtime Search
E - Topsy Twitter Search
F - Twazzup Twitter Search
G - Tweefind Twitter Search
H - Tweetmeme Twitter Search
I - Tweetzi Twitter Search
J - Twitalyzer Twitter Search
About the results. Twitter search returned the two most recent tweets for the #freeseo hashtag (tweets one and two in the first table on this page). For the query freeseo, 11 total tweets were returned. Two of the results included the same #freeseo hashtag tweets, the remaining 9 tweets were the latest from the user @freeseo, with one being from a Twitter user that included FREESEO in a url. From the results in the chart above, and from the search results themselves, one can deduce that for simple obscure searches Scoopler, Twazzup, and Tweetzi are replications of the authentic Twitter search. Tweefind is a weak version of the authentic Twitter search that produced only the most recent tweets for the queries entered. OneRiot and Twitalyzer returned 0 results. It seems that OneRiot delivers results for trending topics, and this is completely an assumption. Twitalyzer uniquely only returns results based on the influence of the tweet, so the result of 0 makes sense. Tweetmeme returned the one tweet from the user that included FREESEO in a url for both queries, which is its purpose. Flaptor only returned the most recent tweet from the Twitter user @freeseo for both queries.
Topsy Twitter Search was the most impressive, even beyond authentic Twitter search. For the query "#freeseo" Topsy retrieved one of the first tweets (tweet #11 from the #freeseo table above) along with the most recent tweet. For the query "freeseo", Topsy retrieved the most recent #freeseo tweet, #freeseo tweet #11, and a link I had tweeted that included freeseo in the url (http://bit.ly/freeseo). The remaining four tweets were a blend of tweets that were unique to all the other realtime search engines. Topsy definitely has a unique realtime search algorithm from the several realtime search engines.
If there is absolute certainty that realtime search will play a role in the internet's future, there is a benefit to understanding these algorithms while they are at the ground level. If Twitter is diligently working on the future of realtime search behind the scenes, then I assume that these results will be dramatically different in the future. But for now, realtime search feels like 1999 web search.
