14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter may have started out as a way to share “what you are doing” with your friends but increasingly it’s used as a way to spread news and to keep up with events faster than with any other channel. This makes its search engine one of its most valuable assets but Twitter search has been constantly criticized for its shortcomings. It now looks like the company has been doing more to fix this, having quietly hired Doug Cook, formerly of Yahoo and Inktomi, in July to take over search development.
While the hire wasn't announced in any way, not even via a tweet, the position is clearly marked on Cook's LinkedIn profile and paidContent has been able to confirm with Twitter that he is indeed the new head of search a position that was created as he came on board. Cook is now responsible for the search engine development, taking over from Twitter's Chief Scientist Abdur Chowdhury, who also comes from a search background, having founded the Summize search engine acquired by Twitter a year ago.
Doug Cook has a solid background in search, having been vice president of engineering at Inktomi for six years until the company was acquired by Yahoo. He then held the same position at Yahoo for a while. He also owns a wine search engine, AbleGrape, which aims “to be the world’s most comprehensive, up-to-date, and authoritative source for online wine information.” The site is rather small in its scope, indexing just 38.000 websites and about 18 million pages, but it does feature some interesting and innovative features as Daniel Tunkelang, chief scientist at enterprise firm Endeca, found.
There are no big announcements coming from Twitter about its search engine, with the company focusing on other aspects of the platform for now, but Cook has only been on the job for one month so there may be better things coming at some point as Twitter is no doubt aware of the importance of its search engine.