Santosh Jayaram, the new V.P. of Operations at Twitter recently said that they will soon start crawling and indexing links that are posted on Twitter. This means that Twitter search results could include several web pages that are crawled from links within tweets.
The indexing function by Twitter Search will be on a much smaller scale than Google Search, but should be very interesting, as it will be a true real-time search engine.
Twitter search is still in the process of figuring out the best way to grade or filter the search results. In other words, they want to make sure that the most reliable and authentic results get a higher ranking.
Jayaram says that tweets should be graded by a reputation ranking system, so that the more credible and informative tweets are placed at the top, as compared to the tweets that are less informative or have been sent by relatively unknown sources.
To achieve this, Twitter will have to change the credibility ranking of Twitter users, depending on the subject that is being discussed.
Follower counts of each Twitter user may be considered, but should certainly not be the only criteria for a high ranking – notching up large numbers of followers is no indication of reliability, as is evident from the fact that Ashton Kutcher obtained 1 million followers before CNN did.
