What is missing in Twitter Search ? Twitter Find !!

It all started with me trying to find what kind of a dog one of my friends had.
He had posted the breed on a Tweet and I tried to search for it.

And then I realized how difficult it can be to use Twitter Search to find something that is not necessarily happening in real-time. Unfortunately (from my perspective) Twitter Search focuses on giving matches (i.e. Tweets that contain the search string) that have been posted recently (i.e. real-time) a higher ranking. Which is fine for real-time search (however one defines real-time search) but misses out on one important aspect of social networking – the NETWORK. I do realize that Twitter is more than just a social networking tool, but one of the most important reasons I use Twitter is to stay connected with my friends and find out what they (i.e. my network) are doing. And I am sure there are people (not just a few) who want to go back and lookup some interesting tidbit of information that somebody in their network had posted, and if that Tweet was posted a few weeks back, then it is like looking up the 455th link on the 17th page of a Google Search.

The image below shows the search results for “Camtasia” and as one can see, all the results are sorted by time – so if I was looking for a Tweet from somebody in my network who had posted a URL a few weeks back on how to convert a .camrec file into a .mp3 file, I would be totally lost trying to search through these results.

Twitter Search Results

And so I started playing around with Twitter Search and its advanced options, and a host of other Twitter search tools like TweetScan and Flaptor but none of them take into account the notion of the NETWORK (and somehow the whole idea of using another tool to search Twitter is just so un-user-friendly). Twitter Search has an advanced feature to specify the “user” whose update you are interested in but once you are following more than 30-50 users and you are posting and receiving daily updates, one tends to forget who posted what. So basically what Twitter needs is a separate mini-search (I call it Twitter Find) that just looks in the Tweets of persons that you are following (and your own Tweets) to handle a host of use-cases like

– A dish that somebody had recommended at a restaurant (e.g. the Al Pastor at Tacos y Tequila and you remember just “Tacos” and “Tequila” as the search terms).
– A URL that talks about solving a specific problem (e.g. one-to-one Hibernate mapping and you remember just “one-to-one” and/or “Hibernate” as the search terms).
– The name of a dentist that was recommended by somebody to somebody else and you just remember “dentist” as the search term.
– And so on and so forth.

But as of now, to use Twitter search to find something in your network is like using Google to find something on your computer’s hard drive. Sorry, bad example, Google Desktop actually does a pretty good job of doing that !!

Cuil vs Google …

Cuil has been unleashed and I just couldn’t help myself from sharing my thoughts on Cuil.

So Cuil happens (or touts itself) to be the answer to Google – it is a search engine started by ex-Googlers – and there was quite a bit of fanfare around it’s launch this week.

I have been using it for the last two days and it actually lives up to its name (i.e. “cool”) but is it really a challenger to Google ? I like the layout of the results which is more user-friendly and intuitive but in all honesty I never had to go beyond the top 5 Google search results to find what I was looking for. I think they (Cuil) get a thumbs up with regards to protecting the end-user’s privacy because they do not record any information about the end-user as compared to Google. Google stores the searches coming from each IP address and I am sure if you have a Google account (e.g. GMail, Google Docs, etc.) they can easily link those IP addresses to “real users”. Google claims that this results in a better search experience (they can show more relevant ads).

Anyway, we can go back and forth with respect to the pros and cons of Google and any new search engine that is willing to challenge it. In my opinion everything really boils down to how well they “do” search. Now Cuil boasts that it’s index (120 billion) is 3 times bigger than Google, so I decided to put both their indexes to test.

I was trying to edit the artist information of multiple songs in my iTunes library and I just couldn’t remember how I had done it in the past. I searched for “itunes change artist name for multiple songs” and the first result from Google’s search helped me solve the problem and this is what Cuil gave me.

Cuil Search Results

Looks like Cuil has a long way to go before it can be called a challenger to Google.