Presenting Twitter in Search Results

by Hutch Carpenter

In a recent post, I described some ways in which tweets should be ranked in search results. A good follow-on question is...

How should tweets be presented in search results?

It's an interesting question - how exactly would you want to see tweets in your Google and Bing search results? And it's an important question, as searches are critical bases for discovering information and huge drivers of traffic.

Tweets are different from web pages. They are more ephemeral, but also much more current. They're short nature means we can consume them much more quickly than fuller web pages. In many ways, their brevity reduces their "burden of interestingness". Read, move on. Read, move on. Read, move on.

Tweets are small nuggets of insight, and pointers to good content. Web pages are the foundational information components. The value of the two digital forms is different. Thus, it makes sense to consider options for presenting these different types of information to people.

Three different designs for presenting tweets in Google and Bing search results come to mind:

• Separate tweets-only search page
  
• Tweets displayed in a box on the same page with web pages
  
• Tweets integrated into the overall search results

Let's take a look at the options. For added context, I've included appropriate musical selections.

At the bottom of this post, I've set up a poll asking which approach you'd prefer.

Tweets-only search results

Musical theme: Gotta keep 'em separated.

This is the Bing way. A separate URL for tweets. It's an acknowledgment that tweets really are different from web pages. The graphic below conceptualizes this approach, with a search on 'Madrid':


The graphic above puts tweets searches more in line with overall searches. Right now Bing has no link to tweet searches on its home page. You just have to know the URL exists. Of course, the Microsoft Bing team is working on incorporating the firehose into its search experience, so that may change.

Positives

• Dedicated page allows for much more creativity with presenting tweets, as Bing has shown
  
• Visible link/tab keeps tweet searches more in-the-flow of searchers' actions
  
• Users could easily toggle between the tabs for different types of information
  
• Minimizes risk of disruption to current "golden egg" of web searches

Negatives

• Forces an extra step to see potentially relevant information - click the tweets tab
  
• Somewhat diminishes the awareness of tweets' real-time, up-to-date nature by using same tab structure applied to more static web pages

Tweets in same-page box

Musical theme: Man in the box.

The presentation of real-time tweets on the same page is something Google is experimenting with currently. The philosophy here is that you're looking for multiple types of information in a search. Google already displays web page links, images, YouTube videos, maps, PDFs and other types of content. Tweets are just another type of content.

Something I'd like to see is a separate box of the tweets on the search results page, as shown below:


This design effectively distinguishes tweets from other types of content, while preserving the "all information on one page" philosophy. This is important for Google and Bing advertising, making the search results page even more engaging.

Open question: what's better for ad click volumes? Multiple pages of different content (e.g. separate tabs described previously)? Or a single page with more engaging content?

Aside from the information aspect of tweets, there is also a people aspect. Tweets are as much about the person as they are the content. The separate presentation of tweets distinguishes them from web pages, PDFs, videos and the like.

Positives

• Relevant, up-to-date content improves value of searches
  
• In-the-flow of existing search behavior
  
• Real-time nature is engaging
  
• Find people as well as content

Negatives

• Smaller space constrains presentation options
  
• Potential for a too-crowded visual presentation

Because of the volume of searches run through Google and Bing, there will be a premium on ensuring the quality of the tweets presented. This is important regardless, but even more so here with the number of times people will see the tweets. See Search Engine Tweet Ranking Algorithms for thoughts on how to do this.

Tweets integrated with overall search results

Musical theme: Happy Together

There is a third design option. Why not put the tweets right in the mix of overall search results? Treat them less as exotic new forms of content, and more as just another type for searchers to click on. The graphic below conceptualizes this:


A tweet is just another URL that can point searchers to relevant content. The challenge is that Google and Bing need to alter their ranking algorithms to allow tweets to be served up high in search results. Something like a pagerank for the twitter account itself. If it has relevant content and a high "Twitter pagerank", it gets served up higher in the search results.

Positives

• Searchers get tweets in a highly familiar way
  
• Minimizes risk of disruption to current "golden egg" of web searches

Negatives

• Undermines the fresh, up-to-date nature of tweets
  
• Will limit presentation of relevant tweets due to inadequate "Twitter pagerank"
  
• Reduces the people aspect of the tweets
  
• Lack of real-time flow diminishes engagement of the results page

Of course, tweets are served up in search results today. But that generally happens with very specific multi-word searches that match the tweet, or including the word "twitter" in the search. The design above brings tweets more fully into the pantheon of content, displaying them highly in search results for basic keywords.

I imagine smart folks can come up with other designs for displaying tweets. Leave a comment on these three or any other designs you think might be interesting.

Also, take a second and vote in the poll below. I'm curious what people think about the different possibilities for displaying tweets.

Thanks.

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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Facebook will Rule the World

I was looking at blog publishing alternatives yesterday to see what new developments are available, and after a stop at Twitter that led me to Facebook, I had an epiphany. Facebook is going to rule the online world, and here is why:

Before the invention of the automobile, towns were built around town squares or high streets. Town squares were gathering places, often populated by churches. Italy has the piazza, Germany the platz. Clusters of stores and restaurants often were nearby. In the UK, these clusters of retail businesses are called a high street, in the United States they became known as main street. In the United States, main street is dead or dying, replaced by shopping malls, strip malls, and big box stores. The negative consequence of this is the loss of community as these stores have larger catchment areas and lack that neighborhood feel, resulting in further isolation of individuals from each other.

Building upon the increasing isolation of individuals from each other, people are at the same time becoming more mobile meaning that people are more and more likely to have friend networks that span hundreds or thousands of miles. More and more people are 'hanging out with their friends' online and Facebook is one of the places that this happens in spades. 'Online Community Sites', as they are now referred to, like Friendster, Bebo, MySpace have exploded.

The reason I say that Facebook is going to rule the world, is that relationships are more important to us as humans than anything else other than food, shelter, and clothing. In the early days of the Internet, there was very little community and it was characterized as a patchwork of "properties" spread around the globe, and the result was that the "portal" became very popular and people flocked to sites like Yahoo! and MSN, and search engines like Live.com and Google. In fact four of the top five Alexa-ranked sites are the four I just named. But things are about to change. Spots six through ten in the Alexa rankings are currently all occupied by community sites (MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia, Hi5, and Orkut).

The Internet is becoming a lot more relationship-focused and Facebook is leading this enablement by treating their site more as a platform. It won't be long before people expect to be able to go to Facebook or their favorite community site and check their e-mail, browse their favorite news items and send text messages while still keeping track of what their friends are up to. These type of integrations will represent the next wave of innovations online. Instead of portals adding community as a feature, the innovation will come from a company like Facebook leading with relationships and then seamlessly integrating tasks and information into the community site in a way that allows people to customize these features to their needs.

My interaction with e-mail is already changing thanks to Facebook. I go onto Facebook to see what people are up to and a news item from one of my friends will trigger a contact, not through my Yahoo! account, but through Facebook. Yahoo! Mail can't provide this kind of contextual prompt. Google tries to achieve some level of this in GMail by showing you who is online for chatting integrated together in the mail window, but I don't know what people are up to. Nothing really sparks my curiosity or my likelihood to contact someone. Why is this important?

Money is allocated in the Internet economy based on the number of page views and the level of engagement. If people suddenly start initiating e-mails on Facebook or browsing classifieds or jobs on Facebook or who knows, maybe even news content, then the money moves with them. What happens if people suddenly stop typing in google.com or live.com directly into their browser and instead search off a widget in Facebook instead that drives revenue Facebook's way?

Facebook not only has the potential to move up the rankings tables, but the revenue tables as well. When you look at this way, Facebook was smart to turn down Yahoo!'s $1 Billion.

So what are the portal players and search engines up to?

Microsoft has Spaces on live.com and is invested in Facebook, Google has Orkut, and Yahoo!, well Yahoo! wanted Facebook but didn't get it and 360 is pretty lame. Now I'm no betting man or industry analyst but I would look for Yahoo! to do a deal in the next six months for a community site at an overinflated price. Facebook is about to overtake Yahoo! in the same way that Yahoo! overtook AltaVista. Now you see why I believe Facebook is going to rule the online world.

What do you think?