The Twouble with Twitter Search

There has been a flurry of reports about Twitter search–whether about Twitter’s plans to improve their search functionality or about alternative ways to search Twitter. But Danny Sullivan makes a great point in a recent post about Google:

Ironically, Google gets a taste of its own medicine with Twitter. It still can’t access the “firehose” of information that Twitter has, in order to build a decent real-time search service. If it can’t strike a deal, expect to hear the company start pushing on how “real-time data” should be open.

Of course, that logic applies not only to Google, but also to anyone with aspirations to build a better mousetrap for Twitter search. As things stand, applications can’t do much better than post-processing native Twitter search results–which makes it hard to offer any noticeable improvement on them. If Twitter offered full Boolean set retrieval (e.g., if a search for star trek returned the set of all tweets containing both words), then applications could implement lots of interesting algorithms and interfaces  on top of their API. I’d love to work on exploratory search applications myself! But the trickle that Twitter returns is hardly enough.

I believe this limitation is by design–that Twitter knows the value of such access and isn’t about to give it away. I just hope Twitter will figure out a way to provide this access for a price, and that an ecology of information access providers develops around it. Of course, if Google or Microsoft buys Twitter first, that probably won’t happen.