Twitter starting to sort search results by relevanceDecember 21, 2016 - 12:25 AMT PanARMENIAN.Net - Earlier this year, Twitter started moving away from the reverse chronological timeline and started prioritizing algorithmically "relevant" tweets in order to keep users more engaged. Starting Wednesday, December 21, Twitter will now be ordering its search results the same way in hopes that more relevant results will improve the search experience as well, Engadget reports. Lisa Huang, a senior software engineer on Twitter's Search Quality team, explained the reason for the change in a blog post by pointing out that Twitter moves fast and the most recent results may not be the exact tweet you were looking for. (When you're looking up a tweet with an original joke, for example, but search only turns up the endless quotes and retweets.) In order to decide which tweets to show, Huang's team has been testing a variety of factors to perfect the results layout as well as the machine learning model that actually ranks the results. But it is ultimately what you (and everyone else on Twitter) click on that gives Twitter its definition of what is relevant. "A person's behavior on Twitter provides an invaluable source of relevance information," Huang wrote. And Twitter has data showing everything from which tweets you've seen to which tweets you've interacted with and how you interacted with them. "Using this information," Huang continued, "we can train machine learning models that predict how likely a Tweet is to be engaged with." Those machine learning models then rank "relevant" tweets based on the probability that users will engage with it. While it make sense that everyone wants to see the most appropriate information to their search, the fact that a tweet is likely to get a lot of retweets doesn't necessarily make it relevant either. To show the new results page in practice, Twitter offered a side-by-side of comparison of the old layout (below left) versus the new (right) for a search of #MrRobot. While the new page is less cluttered, at least in this example it also seems to favor the brands and official accounts while pushing individual users further down the page. Top stories Yerevan will host the 2024 edition of the World Congress On Information Technology (WCIT). Rustam Badasyan said due to the lack of such regulation, the state budget is deprived of VAT revenues. Krisp’s smart noise suppression tech silences ambient sounds and isolates your voice for calls. Gurgen Khachatryan claimed that the "illegalities have been taking place in 2020." Partner news Most popular in the section | European Parliament to discuss repression in Azerbaijan The European Parliament will discuss repression of civil society in Azerbaijan on April 24 PACE wants concessions from Azerbaijan to accept Baku back A PACE co-rapporteur said that Azerbaijani authorities must make certain concessions so that the country can return to PACE. Cyprus parliament honors Armenian genocide victims Acting House President Zacharias Koulias noted that April 24 marks the “black anniversary” of the Armenian genocide. Armenia PM, France envoy discuss regional matters Issues related to the consistent development of Armenia-France cooperation were discussed. |