Friday 26 March 2010

Most Popular Tweets

Most Popular Tweets’ Search Project good or bad idea?

Search Engine Land mentioned that Twitter’s search team is working on a project to uncover the most popular tweets for any search query, but it’s unclear when or where the project might be implemented.

The question here is whether this would encourage online marketers spamming the results.

It works well for Youtube, as a video would hardly be featured as one of the most popular videos if it is it not popular with users. It is also time consuming and costly to make good videos that can attract users. With Twitter, marketers can start hiring someone to twit interesting things including relevant keywords and brand with “#” tag. Seems a bit too obvious what the next marketing strategy here.

Also, what happen if user types “earthquake” and the most popular tweet was the earthquake in Haiti, so instead of showing the most recent one in Indonesia, it shows Haiti. This would not work in users’ best interest.

Ideally, Twitter should give options whether users want the most recent result with their query or the most popular result.

What do you think?

Thursday 11 March 2010

Real Time Results

Users paying attention to real time search results?

OneUpWeb – an online marketing firm conducted a study regarding the impact of real time data into search results.

The study, that was conducted in February, was sought to answer the following questions

1. Does an internet user recognise and understand real time results?

2. Are the users finding and clicking on the real time results?

3. What are the users opinion about the real time results ?


Eye tracking Study

Eye tracking Study


The results were very interesting.

1. 73% had never heard of real-time results before participating this study

2. The majority of the participants surveyed were indifferent to the real-time results

3. Only a quarter of the consumers cared for the real-time results.

In a nutshell this enormous hype about involving the real time search results… the internet users don’t understand what the fuss is all about…