SearchResearch Challenge (5/24/17): Finding tweets from a particular place
When big events happen, people tweet about it.
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???
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| 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!
