Big changes coming to Twitter Search

Twitter appear to finally be doing some interesting stuff with their search application. Twitter search was recently integrated into the home pages of all Twitter users. This meant that rather than having to go to search.twitter.com, users could search Twitter right from their home page.

The latest news is that Twitter are working on crawling the links that people post in their tweets. Cnet Webware reported yesterday that Twitter search, which in the past only indexed the text of tweets, will begin to index the pages that people are linking to on Twitter.

This is a big development as it will begin to make Twitter Search a more complete search engine and more on par with Google. In the past, Twitter search was fantastic to searching what people are talking about, but it was not particularly great for finding useful content; however, Twitter Search may have the one up on Google as their search engine is real time. So you will be finding content that people are talking about then and there.

Twitter are also planning on taking into account reputation ranking in Twitter Search. This will mean that when you search for a particularly talked about trend in Twitter, Cnet point out, “Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank search results in part based on that”.

This will be an interesting addition. Currently Twitter search just shows results based by time, and nothing else. When reputation comes into it, arguably you will get more relevant results.

Twitter have not said how they will rank reputation though. It may be something similar to Twitter Grader; basing reputation on number of followers and number of friends, as well as amount of retweets and conversation frequency.

It is unclear whether results from people with a higher reputation will give us more relevant results. Take the Schiphol disaster as an example. We could end up just seeing what Stephen Fry said about something, and that might not be as relevant as seeing results from people that were actually at Schiphol whitnessing the event. Hopefully Twitter will take things like this into account.