Well, it's kind of a weird feedback loop. Say you are following a trending bot (many many people do, a surprising number to me). As soon as you see a tweet from your favorite trending bot, you click the link and head over to see the results.... Well, all the other bots are tweeting at about the same time, so as soon as a new trend appears you get a dozen or so trend-bot tweets appearing in the results you just loaded up. I will admit this can be semi-annoying. Disproportionate? I guess it depends on how many results your browser loads by default. Mine is always set to 100, so I can scroll by the bots pretty quickly, but if people are only seeing 25 at a time, they'd have to click "Next" or "Older" to get past the bots.
Like I said in my blog post, once you are actually searching for a trend, you don't need a dozen things telling you it's a trend again.. you're already there! Some bots are "worse offenders" than others and just spew all the trends every 5 minutes or retweet people (randomly it seems) that match the trend (not naming names, I'm sure you can figure them out). As a means of driving traffic they are very effective (at least the one I run seems to be). A little over 50% of the traffic to tweetgrid.com/search comes from links posted by my bot. I am not sure if the effectiveness can be attributed to the mere fact that the bot exists, or because it has some useful information attached (e.g. #trend has risen to the #3 trend! <link>). Very few of the bots seem to talk about the rank of the trend, but mine does, so it has some added value. I think this has helped my bot, and it also means that it gets retweeted quite a bit (another big surprise to me). In all honesty, I started my bot because one of my competitors convinced one of the existing trend bots to link to their site instead of search.twitter.com. I launched my bot in defense. A long, meandering answer to a short question. I am somewhat conflicted on the issue since I run one of these bots, but I will admit I find the greasemonkey script to blow them away quite nice. How's that for a definite maybe? -Chad On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 11:11 AM, Doug Williams <do...@igudo.com> wrote: > > Chad, > In your experience, do trending bots have a disproportionate > participation in the search results for trending topics? Have you done > any analysis like that? > > Doug Williams > @dougw > - Show quoted text - > On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 10:43 AM, Burhan TANWEER <btanw...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I agree with him. Search trends are not available in xml format. I will >> appreciate, if twitter can provide search trends in xml and so that i can >> update my social search engine ExploreWWW.com with search trends in real >> time. >> >> Thanks >> Burhan >> >> On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 11:09 PM, TjL <luo...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>> Specifically >>> >>> 1) There are WAY to many "trending topic" bots which fill search >>> results with useless clutter >>> >>> 2) I'd love to see a "trending topics" list that does NOT include hash >>> tags, you know, to find out what ordinary people are talking about :-) >>> >>> I know this is the wrong place for it (sorry) but I'm not sure where else >>> to go. >>> >>> TjL >> >> >> >> -- >> Sincerely, >> >> Burhan Tanweer >> www.explorewww.com >> expl...@explorewww.com >> >> > > > > -- > Doug Williams > > do...@igudo.com > http://www.igudo.com >
