Will Twitter Search Change The Search Engine Landscape?
At the sidelines of an entrepreneur conference, TiEcon, yesterday, CNet Webware editor Rafe Needleman reported on Twitter’s ambition to power up its usefulness as a search engine contender. But will this be enough to give Google or one of its competitors a run for it’s money.
On the looks of things, Twitter is doing the right thing like bringing Google’s former manager of search quality operations Santosh Jayaram over to Twitter as its new vice president of operations.
In the works:
- Introducing indexing and crawling capabilities to spider links contained within users tweets
- A reputation ranking system to give weightage/priority according to a Twitter users authority
As an example, Santosh cited examples of the Twitter.com sidebar would containing “trending” hot topics, which already appear in Twitter users web profile pages now.
To be viable as a search engine alternative, not just against the big 3, but also sites like YouTube, Facebook and MySpace which feature their own search engines, Twitter will need to leverage on its immediate nature and use this advantage to provide real-time updates like Twitter API-powered site TwitterFall.
As hot upstart Twitter continues to introduce unique and creative values for its users, we might see the internet users expectations to demand real time updates from search results, with a corresponding change in user behavior.