Twitter Trend Search Relevancy

Social networking site Twitter has announced changes to its search engine. Instead of just matching keywords a Twitter search will now take into account unspecified “relevancy” factors. Initially the change will only apply to searches for trending queries.

Although the Twitter blog post doesn’t say so explicitly, this seems to be an effort to clean up some of the spam that’s been clogging Twitter trends. Twitter talks of “clutter in the public timeline”, which I guess refers to spam posted with a trending hashtag.

It appears the relevancy algorithm is either self-learning or expected to change, with Twitter saying:

The improvement won’t be very noticeable at first, but this is a small step toward unearthing more value in search and getting you more relevant results

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