It’s no secret Twitter has a desire to have a stronger search presence. With business models that thrive on content publishing and organization, a strong search product is necessary to provide the most revenue down the road. Just today, while announcing its 140th employee and celebrating to the music of BT, Twitter hired Michael (Michi) Busch, search indexing expert and committer to the Open Source Lucene search project to its team as a “Search Engineer”, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Busch brings with him not only strong experience in his contributions to Lucene, but also a firm background at IBM working on IBM’s eDiscovery Analyzer product, focusing on indexing and search technologies there as well. Busch is a regular presenter at various ApacheCon conferences, so I’m sure this won’t be the last we hear of him while working for Twitter.
Just after Twitter’s announcement today of its focus on Open Source standards, the hiring of Busch just solidifies that there will continue to be a focus on open technologies at Twitter. Lucene, perhaps one of the most widely used open source search indexing products in the world, we can now wonder if it will play a part in that process. With one of its committers working for Twitter, we can hopefully expect real-world cases of search indexing technology integrated into the open source product in the future.
Twitter continues to expand its team of smart talent, and it seems almost weekly continues to add to its pool of geniuses from the likes of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and IBM. As I said before, it’s this talent pool that continues to excite me about Twitter and have a strong belief in its future. With Busch now working on the search product, there’s no doubt that Twitter has an interest in good technology, and helping the community as it grows. I can’t wait to see what Busch can bring to Twitter.
