How we sort results in Murmel feeds

A question we sometimes get asked is how Murmel feeds get their results sorted. It is not uncommon to get a post at the top shared by one person, followed by another shared by many more.

This makes people who have tried similar tools ask themselves about the logic behind that.

The reason for this way of sorting lies in our scoring system.

When it comes to determining the importance of a story, link, or piece of news, Murmel uses a combination of signals. The number of links to a post is the strongest one, but we also consider the Twitter popularity of the post, its recency, and its "readability." This last one is an AI-driven in-house system that analyzes each post and gives a bit of a boost to the more informative ones.

The combination of factors allows us to appeal to both people who follow many accounts on Twitter and those following only a few.

We also think that the variety makes the digests more interesting. Rather than featuring the same couple of posts at the top for days, we wanted to give a chance for other interesting stories to pop up too.

I hope this explanation sheds some light. Of course, we want to build a customer-driven service, so if you think we should consider other ways of sorting, we will take your opinion into account.

Murmel is soon going out of beta. Sign up and enjoy 30 days for free.