Yesterday I wrote about how Twitter will soon begin indexing links for search. Ending that post I asked how you think Twitter should base their reputation ranking system; should it be based on the number of followers a user has? What about the number of retweets they have? Maybe some other way?

Twitter is great for finding out that something is happening right now. Its great for getting headlines and brief information about current events, but where it struggles is allowing users to find more information relative to these topics. It is hard for users to sift through the millions of tweets to find more detailed information.

In a post by Stan Schroeder earlier today, he mentioned, “this reputation ranking system is far more complex than a simple combination of factors such as followers and retweets. The system needs to be contextual; it needs to recognize which tweeple are important for a certain keyword or phrase.”

This is an important thing to consider, because if Ashton Kutcher were to tweet about something related to Google, even though he has the most followers on Twitter, it shouldn’t matter as much as if say, Matt Cutts were to tweet something related to Google, given his role within Google and his familiarity with the topic. Tweets relating to Hollywood news or upcoming movies? In this context is where Ashton is relevant and can shine. Much as tweets from the White House are more relevant coming from Obama, rather than say, myself (even though Obama has 1.1 million followers compared to my 700, that’s beside the point).

This is a complex problem because the Twitter search algorithm needs to analyze keyword density within each tweet and connect that to the number of retweets, the user tweeting it, how many followers they have, etc. Hopefully it is something the folks at Twitter are working on ironing out. How do you think they should handle the reputation ranking system?

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.

Twitter announced yesterday that they have integrated the search functionality from Twitter Search into every user’s profile. Many people, including myself, were waiting for this day, where they could perform searches and find out what is happening now in real-time, right from their Twitter home page. With this technology being made freely and easily accessible to everyone, Twitter has taken another giant step in becoming a real-time search engine; providing something that Google simply can’t. According to the Twitter Blog, “With this newly launched feature, Twitter has become something unexpectedly important—a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now.”

The new features of the integrated Twitter Search allow users to search for topics and conversations quickly, and it also allows users to save topics they tend to search for frequently. Being an avid hockey fan, I am constantly searching for #NHL, #hockey, #”minnesota wild”, and the list goes on and on. Now, I can simply save these searches, and with just one click I can get all the hockey news I can handle.

Twitter has also cleaned up the user’s experience. They have cleaned up the “home,” “@mentions,” and “direct messages” tabs, and also added the ability to collapse the “Trending Topics” and “Following” sections of the right hand column as well.

I would only assume this makes Twitter as a more viable tool to rival Google, but I want to know what you think: what does this new Twitter Search functionality mean for Twitter in the future?