What is search.twitter.com's "trending topics" algorithm?

Question

What algorithm does twitter use to determine the 10 topics that you can see at search.twitter.com? I would like to implement that algorithm and I would also like to show the 50 most popular topics (instead of 10). Can you describe the most efficient algorithm?

Thanks!

(Twitters API can be found at- http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST%20API%20Documentation)

Also, I would like to be able to implement the algorithm by searching through the public timeline- http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.rss

Answer 1

we cant tell you the exact algorithm, as twitter is closed source. We don't have access to the code... so at best, you'd get a guess

Answer 2

I'd assume Twitter tracks searches and calculates the most searched in the last 60 mins prior to your search. As Martin said, Twitter is not oepn-source so we're not going to eb able tot ell you what the exact algorithm is.

Answer 3

I guess I used the wrong words. I edited the question for clarity.

Answer 4

So what Twitter probably does is it counts the number of mentions of a particular term minus stop words (stop words like : do, me, you, I, not, on etc) So "the cat is out of the bag" and "my dog ate my cat" would mean that cat ,dog and bag would be the terms it extracted (the rest are all stop words) And it then counts 'cat' as 2 references, so 'cat' would be a trending topic in this case.