The Fleeting Nature Of Twitter: 17 Percent Of Top Searches Change Every Hour

Nearly 20 percent of the top search queries on Twitter at any given moment won’t be a popular search query just one hour later. That’s according to a new research paper that Twitter will present this week at a social media conference.

Twitter researchers Jimmy Lin and Gilad Mishne analyzed all search queries on the site during October 2011 and discovered that 17 percent of the top 1,000 search queries from one hour aren’t in the top 1,000 queries the next hour.

The churn of Twitter search activity is nearly the same when measured at a daily level, rather than hourly. Lin and Mishne say that 13 percent of the top 1,000 queries from one day are no longer in the top 1,000 the following day.

By using October for their research, Lin and Mishne were also able to look at search activity surrounding one of the year’s busiest days on Twitter: October 5, the day that Steve Jobs died. On that day, the search query “steve jobs” spiked up to 15 percent of Twitter’s query activity — it’s literally off the chart that appears in the research paper.

That’s just one of several graphs showing the churn of Twitter search activity. You can download the full paper yourself if interested.

Twitter’s blog post also includes some results from other company papers that data junkies are bound to enjoy.