Twitter Will Begin Indexing Links for Search
Posted May 7th, 2009 by Brad Wellman
Brad Wellman
Spyder Trap Online Marketing
Twitter Search, as many know, is perhaps the most relevant search engine out there today, by monitoring and tracking conversations and trending topics. It allows users to get the most up-to-the-minute updates along with what people around the world are saying about current events. Now however, Twitter is making a key move to take them to the next level as a legitimate search engine…indexing.
According to TechCruch, “Twitter Search will soon begin crawling the links that people tweet about and indexing them.” This means that it will not only be just a collection of text-based tweets from Twitter users, but it will also include a heap of webpages, and Twitter will also crawl/index the content of these pages as well.
Isn’t this what Google does? Yep. This doesn’t seem all that surprising, considering the new VP of Operations for Twitter is Santosh Jayaram, the former VP of Search Quality for Google.
Does this mean that Twitter is looking to replace Google? No, actually. Far from. Twitter’s value lies in its ability to provide real-time results. “Twitter Search is meant to be a different kind of powerful search engine in its own right. A smaller, potentially curated, real-time search engine.”
How is Twitter going to tailor search results? They are looking to develop a reputation-like ranking system for filtering search results, but how they will do it is anyone’s guess. Should they base it on the number of followers a user has? The number of retweets a tweet receives? That is still being determined, but one thing is for certain; it will be an interesting thing in the works over the next few months.
Tags: Google, Twitter, Twitter Search
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