There are lots of ways to display search results, and the familiar (if impoverished) ranked list of links with snippets is just one possibility. It doesn’t work particularly well for Twitter, for example because for many kinds of searches it’s hard to make sense of the tweets individually; instead, a more holistic approach is more appropriate. I described in one such approach in Making Sense of Twitter Search (the position paper was co-authored with Miles Efron and was presented at a CHI 2010 workshop on microblogging) .
Paper.li is another approach to visualizing sets of Tweets. For a given topic or user, it identifies documents referred to by your followers and builds a two-column online newspaper-style layout out of those documents. It classifies documents by broad categories (media, education, technology, etc.) and prominent hashtags (e.g., #facebook), show the leading paragraphs or two of the document, and the person who tweeted it. Media such as YouTube videos are embedded directly into the layout. And, you can, of course, switch to a list view.
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