Zulu Digital | Ranking Twitter Tweets in Bing | Real Time Search

So, Bing is now providing it's US-based users with the ability to search Tweets from within it's SERPs, which is of course, interesting stuff and is a step forward in terms of real-time search, which we've been talking about for months now.

It won't be long before the service is provided to the UK public, but what seems to be attracting a substantial amount of attention is that of the ranking algorithm which Bing is employing.

There are two options within the Bing Twitter Search (www.bing.com/twitter) - 'Most Recent' and 'Best Match'. Clearly, the 'Most Recent' resultset simply returns a list of Tweets which appear in chronological order, but 'Best Match' returns the list of Tweets based on another factor.

Initial investigations suggest that the 'other factor' which affects the ranking of the Tweets, is that of the number of 'Followers' which that particular user has. The more Followers a user has, the more authoritative his/her Tweets are considered to be.

I think at this stage, we can expect the algorithm to be pretty basic, - as Google, MSN and Yahoo algorithms were when they were first made live some years ago. It is important for Bing to develop this algorithm pretty quickly however, else, in a world of real-time search, spammers will soon take advantage and the SERPs will be full of rubbish.

I'm pretty confident that the algorithm Bing will soon employ will consider the ratio between the 'Followers' and the 'Following' statistics. Anyone can get a large number of Followers, and with a number of Twitter users making use of the 'automated following' facility, this figure is not necessarily the most reliable statistic. I could, for example, follow 10,000 Twitter users, whom I know automatically follow anyone following them. Obviously, based on the current algorithm, this would provide me with substantially more 'authority'.

It is clear to see that on the most part, the people who are perhaps worth following and have genuinely interesting stuff to talk about, tend to attract a higher number of followers than the number of people they choose to follow. If the algorithm was based on the best ratio between 'Followers' : 'Following', this new method of 'spamming' would be avoided, and the genuinely authoritative sites would appear within the 'Best Match' SERPs.

I just wonder whether Google will employ such a basic algorithm once it starts outputting Tweets into it's SERPs.

Author - Tom

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