Twitter has taken the world by storm in recent times with increasingly more blogs, Ezines and offline media discussing the new social medium. With the amount of coverage Twitter has received in the past months and the phenomenal user sign-up rate, Twitter needs to stay on the ball and continue moving forward with this innovative platform.
Part of the novelty is Twitter’s very own ‘search engine’. Twitter Search is a simple text matching engine which returns the most recent tweets based on the keyword entered. The disadvantage to this means you’ll often see duplicate and recurring tweets and, even then, the results don’t always correspond with what you searched for in the first place.
Twitter’s new Vice President of Operation, Santosh Jayaram, has revealed that new features are to be introduced to the search engine shortly. This will include indexing content outside of Twitter by crawling links within the tweets and adding a ranking algorithm to their search results. This will allow for the content from the external sites to match with the original tweets. It has also being suggested that the new algorithm will take into account the users reputation on Twitter and relevancy of hot topics.
The advantage of the current Twitter Search is that it supplies ‘up to the second’ results providing the most recent information on the latest trends. My question is – will waiting for new and external content to index slow down results, as this is one of Twitters main strengths? Jayaram, previously employed by Google, states he does not know how the new algorithm will operate so let’s hope it corresponds with Twitters strengths and doesn’t go against them.