Comments on: Post Google-Twitter Launch: How is Google Indexing Twitter Today?

By: Philippe TREBAUL

Philippe TREBAUL — Sun, 19 Jul 2015 15:18:58 +0000

A very interesting article.
Thank you for that.
Best regards.
Philippe

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 17 Jul 2015 04:29:53 +0000

Google has limits? You just shattered my dreams.
I like the analysis.
I guess the real question is how many tweets actually have value to search results? I skimmed my personal twitter account, and well the unless you are in my circle of friends, the tweets would have zero value to you. Heck you might even lose a few brain cells reading them.
With roughly over 500 million tweets per day, I am guessing the vast majority are worthless.
Personally, I would rather not have my personal search results polluted with tweets.

By: Sören

Sören — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 10:03:15 +0000

Hi Eric,
thanks for you insights. I was intrigued by your analysis and took our computing cluster for a spin analysing ~100M Rankings for USA/Germany to check about tweet ranking development. You can find my results here: http://www.seolytics.com/blog/20150714/twitter-google-an-index-romance/

By: Robert Worstell

Robert Worstell — Sat, 11 Jul 2015 14:14:45 +0000

Thanks for this analysis. It’s welcome news.
Perhaps missing is the amount of relevant data in that 100-140 character post – “…find an effective use for that additional data” is an interesting phrase.
In an online world where Google values long blog posts of 2000 words (which may be as much or more than 16,000 characters) – it may be that a high percentage of this firehose content has actually no value, or can’t be evaluated.
When we are seeing over 3% of the data indexed, we may be seeing the most valuable part of it. That ratio is common in other industries (paid advertising has a much worse ratio, overall – percent of data people find valuable enough to click at.)
Your point of using social authority as a metric seems closer to what we are told is how Google values content overall, especially news sites and blogs. With the high percentage of fake accounts (eg. some celebrity-politicians having 50-70% fake followers or more) – The whole twitter index scene could probably max out at 20%, but more than likely much lower. (Pareto principle applied to itself says that about 4% is the really key material of any data stream.)
Thanks again for this great report.

By: Eric Enge

Eric Enge — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 12:37:50 +0000

In reply to C James.

My bet is that no deal for Facebook content will happen. FB and G are deadly enemies, and they both want it all, so I don’t see any coopetition in the works there.
Back to your assumption, my belief is that Google DOES have limits, and this is a major driver in why the indexation is so low at this point. They make choices all the time. You can see that going back to their decision to stop looking at rel=author tags last year. You can also prove this with large sites where they routinely don’t index all of the pages.
Of course, if they start to see real value in something, they will go index it.

By: C James

C James — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 11:59:39 +0000

This is an interesting study, and very useful.
My first assumption was that Google has no limits, and can index any and all tweets very quickly, given that they now have “firehose” access (well..not entirely the case as the study shows).
This study points to the importance of authority and trust, which is a common denominator in social media overall. It’s unlikely that Google will index a lot of the spam content on Twitter, so there’s perhaps a guaranteed 12% to 13% of tweets that will never get indexed, simply because of their content.
This brings me to 2 interesting questions (at least for me):
1. Is it possible that as Google indexes more tweets, its algorithm begins to “learn” what’s useful to index and what isn’t? (they probably already have this). If so, would it be possible to get more exposure in Google’s “tweet” index by deliberately optimizing tweets (almost going back to gaming the system)?
I guess this could be used both ways, for ethical business purposes, as well as for less desirable (spammy) purposes.
2. How does this firehose affect security of particular tweets, people who post these tweets and people who RT or even have these tweets in their feed? Will most of Google’s information be monitored, etc? One could argue that there’s already a degree of this happening, however a firehose to twitter content does make Google more valuable in terms of having access to realtime social media activity, which can be played back, analysed and selectively indexed (or de-indexed)
Do you think Google will eventually have firehose access to Facebook content? That would be epic.
All in all, interesting times.
Great post 🙂