User Perspective Search

[samuel_bushi]

Hi everyone,
I am doing a project to analyse filter bubble effect, from a sender’s perspective. For this I am interested in the search results obtained by different users when they search for the same keyword.

Say, if user1 searches for keyword1 and receives say postid2, postid5 as (top) results. And if user2 searches for the same keyword, postid7 and postid5 come up as results. I would like to see how a particular user’s tweets are vanishing overtime in the search results, due to the recommendation algorithm which decides the results (? I’m haven’t tested this hypothesis, if anyone has any idea regarding this, please do say about it)

So, is this possible? If yes, how should I go ahead with this?

Thanks a lot!
Samuel.

[IgorBrigadir]

It’s an interesting problem. AFAIK, there’s not that much personalization in search results - mostly it’s “Slack and 2 others follow” type things that appear above tweets that are user specific. Some “special” search queries will have their own curated pages (eg football scores http://techcabal.com/2014/06/11/world-cup-comes-alive-twitter-fixture-cards-match-alerts-custom-hashtag-pages/ but those are rare) Also the “Top” results on web interface change quite often, and there are likely many experiments running that change what’s shown (user personalisation may even be one of them) that makes it difficult to tell if it’s a filter bubble thing or something else.

I haven’t checked to make sure - but using the API should return the same set of tweets for the same query for different users. Tweets will be shown or hidden from search web interface depending on who the user has blocked or muted too.

[samuel_bushi]

Thanks IgorBrigadir fro your prompt reply.

I haven’t checked to make sure - but using the API should return the same set of tweets for the same query for different users.

So, how can I go about and test this? Do I need some sort of of authentication from the users’ part to do such a query? Links would be helpful.

Thanks again!
Samuel.

[IgorBrigadir]

Yep - get another user to authenticate your application https://dev.twitter.com/oauth/overview and when calling https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/search/tweets use different tokens for the same query. Then compare results - Application Only Authentication Vs User Vs another user maybe. (Remember the tokens are Consumer Key & Secret for application, and a user specific Access Token & secret)

But you should be getting the same results no matter what tokens you use (as far as i can tell - though i’m unsure if blocks / mutes will affect results from API)

The Web search interface is different to the API - I just tried https://twitter.com/hashtag/SCOTUSnominee while logged in and logged out - both show the exact same results, but being logged in adds “Accounts” results - the top photos were the same, but change every few seconds (for both logged in, and logged out page)