Twitter Steps Up It’s Search Game

Search is one of the single most important aspects of the web at this time. This is because of the social nature of the web as we know it today. There is so much information available not only about random topics, but about individuals. Whoever can figure out how to leverage this wealth of data will definitely see success, so the announcement that Twitter is going to start indexing the links in your tweets is quite interesting. This will basically put Twitter in direct competition with Google.

What This Means

We’ve already heard that Twitter search is better than Google in some cases. Because of it’s realtime nature, it’s likely you will find things out via Twitter way before Google ever bothers to index them. This means we will suddenly have a realtime search available to find out exactly what’s hot right now. As we all know, realtime is the new black, so this is a pretty important development for Twitter. This could also mean that Twitter has finally figured out how to make some money from all the attention they get. While this wouldn’t be a comprehensive search of the web, it would definitely be a valuable resource for many and could make it a popular alternative to Google.

Why It May Fail

There are some important issues that will need to be taken care of before this new search initiative can be a success for Twitter. As it stands now, a search on Twitter will turn up a lot of pretty useless data. Not only will you find what you want, but you’ll also find random retweets and other mentions. To combat this, there will also be a tweet ranking system put in place. The developers are still working out the details, which means that they are putting a little thought into it, but this key piece will dictate just how useful this new Twitter search will be. Simply taking follower count or number of retweets into account is not going to cut it.

I’m not convinced that Twitter’s infrastructure can handle indexing the contents of pages we link to in our tweets. Will Twitter be able to maintain stability while indexing external web pages? I’m not so sure.