It was reported earlier this week, by News.com, that Twitter is to improve is current search facility, making it more effective and useful to its users and even make it a competitor for the mighty Google Search.
The current Twitter search feature simply searches the text feeds that are posted by users allowing searchers to see what tweeters are saying about a particular subject.
However it has been confirmed by Santosh Jayaram, the VP of Twitter Operations and former Googler, that this feature is due to be improved and it is planned that Twitter Search will soon crawl the links posted in its tweets to provide people using the feature with more comprehensive, real-time results.
This will supposedly make Twitter Search a plausible competitor for Google Search and give users a current, real-time index of the content on the web.
Twitter is also due to include a “reputation” ranking system, that will take into account the popularity of the tweeters that are talking about the particular “trend” topic that is entered as a search query.
This means that when a search query is entered about a “trending” subject, so a topic that is very popular and consequently gets listed in the Twitter side bar, then all the tweets on this subject will be ranked by the reputation of the tweeter, which should therefore return the most useful results.
If you currently search for a “hot” topic on Twitter the results are dominated by re-tweets and low-value results, however the new algorithm will hopefully improve these results and provide the user with the most relevant and useful posts.
Santosh Jayaram has also said that they are not exactly certain how the new system will work but they hope that it will improve the consistency of the results returned for the majority of keyword searches.
This new report shows that Twitter are clearly thinking a lot more about search and hopes to provide users with a great real-time search engine that will provide users with content and information about up-to-date and current topics.
However Twitter’s new search feature is not expected to be as extensive as Google and will serve a very different purpose and attract a different type of audience.
The big question is, will this concept really work? If Twitter go forward with these plans will simply crawling the content that is linked in its posts really work? We’ll just have to wait and see.
