So yes, President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this morning, and Twitter (and the rest of the Web) immediately blew up. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something become a trending topic on there ever since reports about the death of Michael Jackson started surfacing (I’m not sure which news item was more surprising).
But when I went to Twitter Search to find out what people were saying about the announcement in real-time (cause, you know, that’s what it’s good for) I noticed something I hadn’t picked up on before. Apparently, Twitter automatically refines search queries for trending topics to maximize the number of results you get. This is something that other real-time search engines so far don’t do (at least not OneRiot or Topsy, which are the ones I checked).
I have no idea when this started occurring exactly and I haven’t seen any earlier mentions of this that I can remember. I’m sure you’ll correct me if it turns out to be a really, really old feature and move on to tell me I’m a moron. To try it out, click the current trending topic ‘President Obama’. Only, that will not be the search query that will kick off an overview of tweets, but instead it’ll become “President Obama” OR #obama which evidently turns up much more results.
Update: ok so this appears to be nothing new. Now I’m wondering why they don’t explain why topics are trending anywhere on Twitter Search.
This has been happening for ages!
And you’re still using search.twitter.com?
Question, do you use twitter at all?
I still use both
– just never noticed this before and not sure if it’s a good thing.
Just remembered, you can see the backend of how this works for Twitter in the 4th screenshot of this TC article: http://www.tech...-your-password/
Cheers
Also – they are explaining trending topics (with whatthetrend.com blurbs in search). Maybe I’m just in a test bucket – here’s a screenshot: http://yfrog.com/12×02p
They’ve been doing this for a long time, not sure if before, but definitely since trending topics were introduced to the main layout
I hear Ahmadinejad broke the news to Obama
haha
My twitter is d-o-w-n! *argh*
I wonder if this is an algorithm or human powered
My guess is human-powered, since it was editable from the admin: http://www.tech...-your-password/
LOL at the ads showing up on TechCrunch because you wrote Obama in the article
How NOT to do linkbait. This has to be the weakest TC post I have ever seen…
“I’m sure you’ll correct me if it turns out not to be a really, really old feature and move on to tell me I’m a moron”
I don’t think “not” is supposed to be there.
You fixed it.
This is really old news – I can’t believe I still get my news here…
Have you heard about the new browser, Google Chrome? You should really do a writeup on that!!! Hot off the press!
Fixed indeed, thx. What’s Google?
I think “The name ‘Google’ derived from the word ‘googol,’ which was coined by Milton Sirotta, a nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner.
In mathematical terms, A ‘googol’ refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by 100 zeros. It’s a very large number indeed. In fact, there has not been a googol of anything in the universe; not stars, not dust particles, not atoms.
I think the term Google’s as a corporation it reflects I quote: “ our mission to organize the world’s immense (seemingly infinite) amount of information and make it universally accessible and useful,” aka an Ad Network PPC “cash-cow” making machine.
Using advanced search to find tweets with a “positive attitude” also returns more than just tweets with the classic
… Variations like these are also included: 
^_^ =)
For what it’s worth, you can see the actual queries for each trending topic at these address:
http://search.t...ds/current.json
http://search.t...ends/daily.json
http://search.t...nds/weekly.json
I just noticed this myself a couple of weeks ago, when I happened to click on a trending topic link. I’m sure there are a ton of people who will learn something new from this post. =)
crowdeye.com is pulling direct links to related queries in the lower left…
They do explain some of the topics:
http://twitter....Its%20Friday%22 “People tweet suggested users to follow on Friday.”
http://twitter....%22%20OR%20NASA “Nasa crashed two small unmanned craft into the Moon to see if they could detect the presence of water-ice.”
y, pretty amazing feature
Honestly…I would estimate that every third article is either about twiter, Google or Facebook (or a related tech). Techcrunch is going from boring to annoying because of this (for me anyway).
TopicScoop http://topicscoop.com does real time search refinement for Twitter search
Check out trends in any timeline: http://bit.ly/oznvX
this feature’s been around for many months