Twitter Search to base results on reputation

By Rafe Needleman on 07 May 2009, 11:02am

Twitter's vice president of operations, Santosh Jayaram, has told CNET UK sister site CNET News that Twitter Search, which currently searches only the text of Twitter posts, will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and index the content of those pages.

This will make Twitter Search a much more complete index of what's happening in real-time on the Web, and make it an even more credible competitor to Google Search for people who are looking for very timely content.

Twitter Search will also get a reputation-ranking system soon, according to Jayaram. When you perform a search on a 'trending' topic (a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar), Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank search results partly based on that.

Jayaram did not say precisely how reputation would be calculated. He indicated that engineers are still working it out. But this, again, makes Twitter Search more valuable. Currently, if you search for a hot topic on Twitter, the results may be swamped by retweets and low-value content from hundreds or thousands of other users. A ranking system would help a great deal.