Tag Archives: twitter bot

Guardian launches @GuardianTagBot – which auto answers questions

The Guardian has launched @GuardianTagBot, a Twitter account that answers your questions by returning links to Guardian content.

I tested it by tweeting the word halloween’and in less than one minute received a tweet with links to 30 stories.

http://twitter.com/#!/SarahMarshall3/status/129515479239884800

It works as it is linked to the Guardian’s content API.

In a post introducing @GuardianTagBot, “your new Twitter-based search assistant”, the Inside the Guardian Blog explains:

TagBot will try its best to understand full sentence queries e.g. ‘What’s happening in the Middle East?’ but it will probably respond best to more specific search-style terms like ‘Middle East news‘, or ‘Nigel Slater recipes‘. TagBot might get confused if you are asking for news on Jordan the country rather than the latest antics of Katie Price, so you might want to be as clear as possible! Of course you can swear at TagBot too, but you might make it sad. TagBot will also struggle with personal requests like ‘Will you marry me?’. It’s not Siri.