I've been playing around with theTwitter search engine at http://twitter.com/search?q=&source=navbar&category=search for a while now, and noticed a few oddities. Basically Twitter is using two different search engines to provide results to users. The first, from the home page is what I'd call the basic search option. The advanced search option doesn't appear to be available any longer - or at least, there isn't a link to Twitter advanced, though it's still at http://search.twitter.com/ but you need to know this URL - it's the hang over from when they bought Summize a while back.
Now, I happen to like the Advanced search function - it's quite funky and does lots of good stuff, and is in some important respects different from the basic search. However, more importantly, it handles enquiries in a different way. For example - try "holiday winter" as a phrase search in the basic search option. It ignores the phrase search. However if we try "holiday winter" again in the advanced search option, it works as it should do.
Twitter is using two different search engines (though the database looks the same), with slightly different functionality! I've talked more about this in my Twitter search engine blog post. I also link to 20 different Twitter search engines.
Now, I happen to like the Advanced search function - it's quite funky and does lots of good stuff, and is in some important respects different from the basic search. However, more importantly, it handles enquiries in a different way. For example - try "holiday winter" as a phrase search in the basic search option. It ignores the phrase search. However if we try "holiday winter" again in the advanced search option, it works as it should do.
Twitter is using two different search engines (though the database looks the same), with slightly different functionality! I've talked more about this in my Twitter search engine blog post. I also link to 20 different Twitter search engines.
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