Towards the end of last week Twitter quietly implemented a small tweak to the way it displays search results. The three “œmost popular“ recent tweets containing the search term are now displayed above the rest of the chronological results, with a note to indicate how many times each has been retweeted.
Taylor Singletary, Developer Advocate at Twitter, explains a little of the thinking behind the new feature: “œWith this new project, we want to make real-time search even more valuable by surfacing the best tweets about a particular topic, by considering recency, but also the interactions on a tweet. This means analyzing the author‘s profile, as well as the number times the tweet has been retweeted, favorited, replied, and more. It‘s an evolving algorithm that we‘ll be iterating on & tuning until practically the end of time.“
Here‘s a screenshot of a search for the term “œeaster“, illustrating the new feature:
The “most popular tweets” feature is currently opt-in for developers, so don‘t expect to see it in your favourite third-party app just yet.
