A Behind-The-Scenes Look At How Twitter Search Works

When an event happens, and people instantly come to Twitter to search for the event, how do Twitter systems learn what the queries mean without any context, and collect them as a trend, before the search spike is gone?

Twitter’s official Engineering blog just released an in-depth look at how Twitter search works.

The results are pretty impressive – and enlightening.

Twitter has built a real-time human computation engine to help identify search queries as soon as they’re trending, send the queries to real humans to be judged, and then incorporate the human annotations into Twitter’s back-end models.

Here’s a step-by-step overview summarizing how Twitter search really works:

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