Big events can be pure fun (like Red Bull’s Flugtag “flying” event), they can be tragic (such as the recent terrorist bombing in Manchester, England), and they be technological (Google’s I/O developer conference last week).
But when big events happen, people share on social media–Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Often the real-time event is tracked on Twitter. So it’s occasionally useful to use Twitter to figure out what’s going on.
For example: Is that my friend’s house on fire???
Luckily, not my friend’s house. |
I recently used my ability to search the tweet-stream to find out why there was a huge plume of smoke from a house fire near my home. In just about 1 minute, I went from finding the tweets in my area, searching them for mentions of “fire” and then discovering that a local television station was showing real-time video. That was a fantastic search experience because I learned from the live-stream that it was next door to my friend’s house, and not actually their house that was ablaze! (They did suffer a little heat damage, but the fire department did a great job.)
This makes me think that this is a great SearchResearch skill to know. So it prompted today’s Challenge. See if you can figure them out!
1. When the Google I/O event happened last week, I wanted to see what kinds of things were being tweeted about. Unfortunately, not everyone adds the #GoogleIO hash tag to their tweet, and sometimes people add the hashtag when they weren’t really there. Can you find tweets that were posted from INSIDE of Google I/O 2017?
2. Obviously, you’d like to be able to restrict your tweet lookup by time and date. Can you find those INSIDE tweets from Google I/O that were posted only during the days of the event? (May 17 – 19, 2017)
3. Since you can find the location of a tweet, is it possible to make a map of tweets that are posted from the city of San Francisco during a single day? How would you do this? (I’ll post the best maps in the blog next week.)
4. For completeness, it’s useful to know how many tweets come with a geocode. Can you estimate the fraction of tweets that are geocoded? (I ask because you need to know what fraction of tweets you’re NOT seeing when you do a search for tweets posted from a particular location. If you’re only picking up 5%, then that’s a very different story than if you’re seeing 95% of all tweets.)
Be sure to let us know how you did this!
Search on!