This interview refers to Brad's blog post about Google's recent social search update, which favors posts from Google+ over content from other social networks.

If you're a PostPost user who missed the email I sent you today about a big bug we found and fixed, this post is for you.

I'm gonna just drop the whole thing right in here.

From: Brad
Date: Nov 30, 2011
Subject: This really bugged us.

Hi,

Under normal circumstances I wouldn't email you about a bug fix, but this one was really big.

Here's what you need to know:

1. The bug was in our relevancy engine, which is critically important because it ranks the people you follow on Twitter, and prioritizes your results
2. It's a big deal because the bug may have deprived you of great results from the people you're most connected with
3. The bug is squashed and your results are awesome

Sign in to check out your PostPost results now or read on for the details.

@mikinzie, a new user, reached out to tell us that she wasn't seeing what she expected in her search results. Namely, results from the people she mentioned most. Big red flag for us, because that's exactly what we made PostPost to deliver. We dug in to see what we could find.

A few hours later—and some back and forth with a very patient @mikinzie—and we found an insidious bug lurking in PostPost's relevancy engine, the very engine that ranks the people you follow. This bug had worked its way into our calculator and was occasionally and irregularly overwriting and sometimes even deleting the relevancy calculations for a bunch of our users.

We killed it. Then, we updated everyone's rankings, including those of the people you follow.

Your results are again as they should always be: chock full of awesome stuff from the people you're most connected with on Twitter.

Come back and see for yourself.

Thanks for raising your hand, @mikinzie.

Brad
Founder, PostPost.com
@bradnoble

Still here? Awesome. Because I can't overstate the importance of this bug fix to the PostPost user experience. I can, with your help, give @mikinzie her due: join us in thanking @mikinzie by retweeting this sucker.

This post details a few very important people-friendly improvements to our Twitter strip search tool. But, I'm gonna be straight with you: it's chock-full of nerdy bits.

I tell you that because, hey, I understand that not everyone likes to know how their delicious sausage gets made. If you're one of those types, and you don't have the appetite for it, just know this: your favorite Twitter strip search tool just got a whole lot better. 

Highlights

• The default search syntax moved from OR to AND, so it's easier to find what you're looking for, like untired Steve Jobs quotes
• We've moved beyond generic photo & video searches; now find Instagrams of bridges and YouTubes of monkeys riding pigs
• You hard core types will love the link: operator; use it to find things like this: link:readwriteweb.com Twitter Search Done Right

And now, the bits

Our recent relaunch included an update that enabled you to search inside the Links, Photos & Videos of your timeline. Meaning, you could search for, say, photos of sunsets. Or videos of monkeys.

Sounds great, right? It is. All you'd have to do is click the Videos tab, enter the word monkeys into the search field and whooosh! before you know it you're watching videos about monkeys from the people you follow on Twitter.

And while examples like these work beautifully... 

The big but

... there was a problem lurking in the weeds. The problem appeared when searches included more than one keyword—because our keyword searches defaulted to OR (not AND).

An example to help illustrate the point: let's say you want to find awesome Steve Jobs quotes. To do that, you might think to enter Steve Jobs quotes into the search bar. I assume that's what you'd do because that's what I'd do. You and me, we're not robots. 

Here's the problem: because our search defaulted to OR, you'd get results that contained the words Steve OR Jobs OR quotes. Which means—and writing this makes me cringe—you'd get a huge list of results filled with Tweets about jobs intermingled with Tweets about guys named Steve and a handful of quotes very unlikely to be uttered by Steve Jobs. In other words, you'd get noise.

I knew we could do better because our engineers are fearless, pipe-hittin' nerds. So we went back into the hard stuff and came out with a better product.

Now, compound keyword searches default to AND. 

What does this mean? Simply this: a search for Steve Jobs quotes will get you only those Tweets that include the words Steve AND Jobs AND quotes. Just like you'd think it would. Ahhh... that's better: Steve Jobs quotes

The more focused you are, the more focused PostPost is

This AND thing means that when you add keywords to your search, your search becomes more specific. A more general search for something like term sheet will bring back stuff in your timeline about term sheets. But a search for Zynga term sheet will bring a subset of even more specific results, and some pretty tasty stuff, at that. 

Holla back, Boston. Did you know that @bostinno broke the story when Hubspot acquired oneforty?

But this AND thing isn't all business.

Instagrams, Instagrams, Instagrams

Sure, all Instagrams are Photos. But not all Photos are Instagrams. Now, you can feast your eyes on the Instagrams shared with you on Twitter. Here are all the Instagrams shared with me. But why stop there? This whole AND thing means we can do fun stuff like this: instagram sunset (instagram.com sunset yields identical results), instagram trees & instagram Boston

But if you really want to get specific...

The missing link

This improvement, while not for everyone, is probably the most powerful: now, you can search directly into links with the link: operator. Like this:

link:readwriteweb.com Twitter Search Done Right

That'll take you to the mentions in my timeline of the @RWW article we love so much, with the sweet, sweet headline.

A few more examples from my timeline:

NY Times coverage in my timeline of Occupy Wall Street
link:nytimes.com #ows 

The YFrog I posted from Iceland of my beautiful wife on a fjord in a hot tub under a rainbow
link:yfrog rainbow fjord

And to bring this whole thing full-circle, a YouTube of a monkey riding a pig
link:youtube.com monkey pig

Note: in any of the examples above, the .com TLD is not required, though the fully expanded domain name—ie, instagram, bostinnovation, nytimes or yfrog—is required.

This week brings a couple surprises and a glimpse into the classy bunch that uses PostPost to strip search their Twitter timelines. But before I go into what's different...

What we see week to week

Search term popularity on PostPost is governed by a power law distribution. (I assume this is true for all search engines.)

Even though this chart graphs only the 10 most popular search terms, you can see the power law distribution at work—a very small number of terms was searched considerably more often than the much larger number of terms that were searched infrequently or only once. That two-thirds of the chart are squarely in long tail territory goes to show you that people are usually looking for different things when they're searching by keyword. 

That we are usually looking for different things when we are searching by keyword may explain why lists of trending search terms leave most of us scratching our heads most of the time.

We've considered adding trending or popular terms to PostPost, to help our users discover interesting stuff. If we look back at our chart of popular terms from this past week, it looks like Facebook would be a good bet for a suggested search term, given that it's at or near the top week-to-week. But howzabout fart? (This is the second week we've seen it here in the top 10.) Is this a search term that most users would want suggested? (If you think so, please let us know.) While we await your feedback on that important issue, we'll continue to emphasize things we're pretty darn sure you'll like.

Popular searches that almost everyone likes

Generic searches for links & photos were more frequent than any keyword. Videos were in the top 5. From the looks of it, our decision to emphasize these facets has paid off. (We'll be doing more of this shortly.)

New this week

New this week near the top are #occupy-related searches. Certainly we had a hand in it: earlier in the week we sent an email to each of our users under the subject line "#occupy your timeline" (aka search your timeline for #occupy). We'd discovered amazing, inspiring things doing that, and thought others might, too. (There's always a risk when you suggest stuff like that. As is clear above, it's easy to miss. But, according to our newly minted MailChimp report, the users who got it seemed to like it.)

Also new this week is art. Sure, it's buried in the long tail and so we shouldn't make too much of it... but maybe mentioning it here will help bring it up a bit next week. Above fart.

Right guys?

There's a ton that's new. Here's the topline.

First and foremost... 
Your favorite Twitter strip search tool has a new address: http://postpost.com. (Our old one — http://postpo.st — still works, but we'll be using the dotcom from now on.)

Improved link, photo & video search
Simply put, search is better now. Most notably, you can combine keywords with link, photo and video searches. Find things like links from @wired about the iPhone 5 (ahem) or awesome Space Shuttle Endeavour photos from the Tweetin' astronauts.

Content previews from embedly
A tighter integration with embedly means even *more* of the rich link, photo and video previews you've come to expect from our search results.

An Instagram of The Golden Gate Bridge by @lizgannes, from a search for photos.

The Storify button
All you curators out there, now you can make something out of the great stuff you find on PostPost: click the Storify button to save great Tweets to your soon to be even greater Storifies.

#hashtag and literal searching
Our searches are "fuzzy", which means a search for bananas will return Tweets and links that include the words bananas AND banana. But fuzzy isn't always good, as in the case of a #hashtag or a @username. Now, when you do those kinds of searches, you'll get only exact matches. And since we're on the topic of exact matches... let's say you want to find stuff about Steve Jobs. Well, just put his name in quotes. A search for "Steve Jobs" will bring back stuff about the man, but nothing about Obama's Jobs package.

Bomb-proof sign in
Over the last few months, and to our dismay, we noticed people were having trouble signing in via Twitter. This made for some sleepless nights. After a good hard look at the issue, we found the issue ran deep—all the way to the core of PostPost and how it talks to Twitter. So, when we rebuilt our data center to deliver the fastest search results possible, we rewired our network to solve the sign-in problem, too. We'll be watching very carefully to make sure this works as promised going forward. You shouldn't experience a hiccup the next time you sign in, but if you do please let us know. Sign in and check it out

Thanks for sticking with us as we've grown into the product we're so excited to announce today.

Let us know what you think on Twitter.

Happy searching!

If you've ever used PostPost, you know that we're focused on stripping away noise to deliver super-relevant search results to you.

You see it most on the front-end, but our commitment runs all the way to the very back of the back-end.

First, the front-end...

PostPost is a faceted search engine, which in our case means you can focus your search in on links, photos, videos and content from your friends. These facets help you find what you're looking for quickly because clicking them immediately strips other stuff away, and leaves more room to feature what you do want.

Our results are filled with link, photo and video previews (powered byEmbedly).

Image: strip search of @bradnoble's timeline for photos of "Endeavour," refined by @Astro_Wheels

The back-end

Before search results find their way to the front-end (and to you), our back-end goes to work to strip away the noise.

The first pass we make is to focus on the people you follow. No spam here. But we don't stop there. For you folks who follow more than 200 people, we will only show you results from the top 200 people in your timeline. (Those of you who follow fewer than 200 people will get results from everyone you follow.) 

To identify your top 200, we break the people you follow into two groups. First, and most important, are those people you follow who are personally relevant to you—those people you mention most (@replies, @mentions and RTs). In the second group are those people you follow who are mentioned most by everyone else.

When we first launched PostPost, there was a way to curate what you found into collections that we then called postposts. After kicking around in alpha scrambling to maintain and improve our custom search and curation features—and despite the heart-sinking feeling that came from the prospect of slaughtering one of our darlings—we killed off the curation functionality in order to focus all of our effort on what we had learned was our core strength and greatest value to users: search. 

It was the right move. But it was a sad moment.

We put our heads down to make search better. We were happy with our progress there, but we still missed being able to make stuff out of what we found on PostPost. And then one day the clouds broke. Our spirits were lifted when out of nowhere the good people at Storify dropped the Storify button on us.

We're pleased to announce that once again you can curate what you find on PostPost. The Storify button is there for you, behind each and every Tweet you find.

Click it and a simple tool pops up that makes it easy to drop the Tweet into a new or existing Storify.

If you're a Storify user, you know that they have great real-time search engines baked into their product. But they don't have a way to find new and older stuff from the people you follow. That you do on PostPost. 

With the Storify button, now all of us can curate and save what we find here and there.

If you haven't tried Storify yet, give it a look. It's our favorite way to curate Twitter. But you don't have to take our word for it: see what your timeline has to say about Storify.

Find the code for the Storify button on github.

With search, one doesn't often discover things. 

Obviously, businesses have been built around people finding things with search engines. And finding things is really satisfying. But I'm talking about discovery. Bumping into something you didn't ask for. And being blown away. 

We're constantly blown away by what we find on PostPost. And not just because we're in love with our tech (we are!) and the people we follow who share awesome stuff (we love them, too!). But because of the wonderfully rich link, photo and video embeds that Embedly conjures in our results.

I use the word conjures deliberately because what they do is magic. 

Link previews

Here on PostPost you can preview articles without having to leave your results. Just click the link title, and a preview of the article or post drops drops right into your results.

A preview of a Huffington Post article shared by @ricmacnz, from a search for "Steve Jobs".

Photos

Of course, you can strip search your timeline for great photos you know are there, but you can also discover pics you didn't know were there and are the more amazing for it. 

An Instagram of The Golden Gate Bridge by @lizgannes, from a search for photos.

And of course Embedly brings their preview magic to PostPost video searches, too. 

A YouTube video of the #occupyWallStreet shared by @xdamman, from a video search for "occupy".

Hey, we're not the only ones who love Embedly. We're in good company. And for good reason. Not only are the previews great, but the service is top notch, too.