Should twitter search crawl other microblogs?
Put in summize.com in your browser and it redirects to search.twitter.com. Yeah, finally it has been confirmed by both summize & twitter that the former has been acquired by the latter.
Summize was a search engine formed to facilitate people with the ability to gauge user opinions extracted from blogs and review sites.
Thanks to some extended machine learning techniques and a complex data engine at the back end, summize turned out to be a very effective search engine for what it was meant to do. Now common!! The three co-founders had 7 long years of experience building numerous highly scalable search applications.
They realised early in 2008 that microblogging sites can be the best and most reliable source to figure out how and what people are thinking about some particular thing. And twitter being one of the most popular mb sites around, they started using summize to let people search how people on twitter(a.k.a. tweople) think about something.
They churned out something that really interested twitter, and since the last one month, the folks from twitter were in talks with summize to take it over and they now finally have for reportedly $15 million.
Tom’s heart does not really sound as happy about having sold twitter than being sad about not being able to assure that the promises summize had made to their users would be kept. You can read more about that on Tom’s blog.
What people will look upto is that how twitter goes about developing summize further. It is least likely to crawl other microblogging sites, which could give people much wider results than just crawling twitter would.
After all twitter is for people, people are not for twitter. They bought summize because they felt it to be the best out of all the mb search engine lot. So the best mb search engine should be used to crawl & index the mb’s so as to give people a more reliable opinion of what the internet thinks.
Summize’s vision is clearly given in Tom’s above mentioned blog post, and that is what could have been the reason of sustainability for summize had it not been acquired. So, twitter should rather look forward to giving people better results using their search, than letting people only search twitter.
What do you say?
Should twitter use their search engine to crawl other microblogging sites or should they only do it for their own?
