Twitter’s latest tweak will bring ‘relevant’ tweets on top of search results

Twitter had made this change back in September, but it was publicly announced just recently. Users can continue to check out the recent live tweets, thanks to the ‘latest’ filter, along with ‘photos’, ‘videos’ and ‘news’.

“In order to improve this experience, Twitter search shows relevance-ordered tweets at the top of your search results page. We retrieve Tweet candidates from various sources within a larger time range and rank them with a machine-learned model,” Huang added.

The order of the tweets is decided by a person’s behaviour on the website, which is an ‘invaluable source of relevance information,’ according to the company. Using this information, Huang explains how the team trained machine learning models to predict how likely a tweet is to be engaged with (likes, replies and retweets).

“We can then use these models as scoring functions for ranking by treating the probability of engagement as a surrogate for the relevance of tweets,” Huang explained.

Read: Twitter will convert Vine into Vine Camera app in January 2017t

The blog adds that following a lot of experiments and tweaks within the Twitter system, the company noticed that tweets with media content (videos or images) receive more engagements and are ranked much higher than tweets without media content.