Ever think about what your first tweet was and just cannot remember or take part in a Twitter chat and do not have the url to the chat transcript? Google to the rescue. You may remember that back in December, Google rolled out Real Time Search which was to pull tweets that matched a search query and have them appear in the search results. The results only appeared for very popular topics on the front page of Google and the rest under the “show options” menu. Now Google is taking this a step further and will be making available every single tweet since the birth of Twitter in 2006.
Twitter Instant Replay
To search for old tweets, simply:
1. Go to Google.com and type in your search term.
2. On the search results page, click on Updates
3. The page opens to a chart at the top which is a timeline where you can you can choose to pull results from a specific day, month or year.
4. Under the timeline are the most recent and best results for your search.
This instant replay feature is being rolled out over the next few days and at first only feature tweets back to February 11, 2010. For those that just cannot wait, Google has set up a special where you can go and check this out now. The link defaults to Obama however you can change the search to whatever you wish I did perform a search for social media marketing:
What is very interesting is on the right there is a heading Top Links that is a list of what appears to links to the best query matches. This does not appear on the current version and there was no mention of this on Google’s Official Blog. We can only wonder if this will be another opportunity for paid advertising to appear here or if it will be organic. That will make search engine optimization types scramble to get top rankings in the Top Links.
Google is always working to improve user experience and this is no different. While this is a great tool for when you are looking for tweets from a chat or a topic it also seems like it could be a recipe for disaster for some. Those late night tweets after a few cocktails never seem to sound the same the next morning.
What do you think – is having access to old tweets useful? Will this change the way that you tweet so that you will include a search term that you are trying to rank for? While Google is keeping mum, we have to know that this is just the beginning as at some point it will be announced how this affects your rankings. It is Google and Google is dedicated to improving user experience by matching the search queries with the best results. Maybe it is time to start focusing in on tweets containing keywords for search queries. It just may be beneficial in the long run.
photo credit: keso