Google Real-Time Tweet Search Identifies the Tech Elite

Credit: Heart of Oak

Want to know if you’re truly in the technology elite? Let Google tell you!

Try this:

• Go to Google
• Type in your name and the word ‘twitter’ (e.g. hutch carpenter twitter)
• Look at the results

If you see real-time search results at the top of the page, congratulations! You’re a VIP! If not, well, sorry about that.

As was well covered a few months back, Google has made a deal with Twitter to get the real-time firehose of tweets. The actual rollout of tweets in search by Google is still a work in progress.

But I stumbled across this interesting test of Tech Worthiness in doing research for a different blog post. Some searches result in a display of real-time tweets at the top of the page. What’s interesting is who gets this treatment.

The graphic below shows the Google search results for six different people, along with the word “twitter”:

At the top, you can see four people who are elite. They have real-time tweet searches right at the top of the search results:

• Louis Gray – uber chronicler of Silicon Valley and Web 2.0
• Charlene Li – ex-Forrester analyst, co-author of Groundswell, founder of Altimeter Group
• Chris Messina – leader of the OpenID effort
• Jeff Bezos – founder, CEO of Amazon.com

Jeff Bezos is interesting. He does have a twitter account, but they’re all protected tweets.

At the bottom, you see a couple of the non-elite in the tech world. Ashton Kutcher, the first man to the moon…er…to reach 1 million followers on Twitter does not get the real-time tweet treatment from Google.

And alas, I am not part of the tech elite either.

So there you have it. Google has provided a handy test to see if you’re part of the Tech Elite. Go see how you’re doing.

UPDATES

Several people reported to me on Twitter that they could indeed see my real-time tweets on Google using ‘bhc3 twitter’. Now I had tried that last night and this morning, got nothing. Now they’re showing up, as you can see in the picture below, taken from my iPhone:

When I ran the “hutch carpenter” tweet search on Google last night, there were no results. But on Twitter search, there were a few results.

Ashton Kutcher is frequently mentioned on Twitter, but he doesn’t show up on Google real-time tweet searches. His handle, @aplusk, is also mentioned frequently. Google tweet searches on aplusk were not bringing up his real-time tweets last night. But they are this morning.

A search on ‘Chris Messina’ yields @chrismessina in the real-time tweet search results. So Google does some association there between the two terms.

And there remain people who get no results, no matter what. So the exact nature of this real-time search is a bit murky.

Yet it still appears that the known “tech elite” show up readily.