Lately people have been talking too much about searches on microblogging services. It’s been said that even Google is launching a new microblog search engine in the next few months. Some services exist already such as Twingly or Twitter Search (Summize), but none of them answer my queries as I would like. As a normal user, I would insert into a microblog search engine two type of queries: What’s happening right now? or What’s being said about ____ at the moment?, since it doesn’t make sense to look for information about the capital of Zimbabwe or if I want to know everything about a certain family of birds. It may be possible to guess one of these questions using a microblog search service, but I would use a classic search engine though.
Imagine that you’re a frustated Manchester United fan and you want to know what’s going on regarding your favourite football team. So you go to Twitter Search and look for the terms “Manchester United”. The results will leave you stunned because of the multiple kind of information found. Despite receiving hundreds of results each minute, 90% of the found messages are crap. You’ll get lots of duplicated messages, spam from the media Twitter accounts using twitterfeed, messages written in languages that you probably don’t understand (Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, …), messages written by “irrelevant” users and so so so much crap.
How should a microblog search engine be? Are we retrieving useful information from these kind of sources?
