Posts Tagged "twitter"

Twitter wants to be better at searches for Vines, Periscopes and GIFs

By Medialooker on May 11, 2016 in Blog | 0 comments

Twitter search engineer Sam Luckenbill says the social network is working on improving its search engine’s ability to index content posted to Twitter, Vine and Periscope. Earlier today, I wanted to watch the “Damn Daniel” video. The viral video that turned a pair of white Vans sneakers into a symbol of the life originated as a tweet, so I searched for it on Twitter. Bad idea. Then I remember Google has access to Twitter’s full firehose. Great idea. That’s all to say: Twitter isn’t very good at search. But Twitter seems to recognize that and the need for it to get better. In an abusively technical blog post published on Thursday, Twitter’s Director of Engineering for Search Infrastructure, Sam Luckenbill, said the company is taking another stab at the technology underpinning its search engine to make it better at identifying what exactly it is that people are searching for. “Currently, the core search infrastructure team only maintains indexes of Tweets and users,” Luckenbill wrote. But Twitter isn’t just tweets anymore. There are also Vine videos, Periscope livestreams and Moments, um, collections(?). You might see those things in your feed, or in their respective apps, already. But maybe you want to go back and find a funny “Frozen” Vine you’d seen a couple years ago. Me too, but I had to turn to Google to find it. Sometime in the future, I might actually be able to use Twitter to find that content distributed through one of Twitter’s own platforms, though Luckenbill is playing coy about the possibility (emphasis mine): “We may want to build indexes of Moments, Vines, and Periscope broadcasts,” he wrote. That’s not the only thing Twitter might want to build with its potential newfangled search capabilities. “To build a new media product we might want a new operator to find Tweets with GIFs, or to use content as a ranking signal,” Luckenbill wrote. I don’t know what exactly Twitter is planning, and Luckenbill’s jargon doesn’t help, but here’s what I hope he means: that if I want to go back and find something I saw or heard about that was on Twitter or one of its other apps, I can do it on Twitter, just like...