Twitter To Start Indexing

We all know Google is the undisputed search engine giant who over the years has beaten big boys like Yahoo, MSN Live, etc. Having said that it wont be long before Google gets stiff competition from Twitter. Yes that's right, if reports are to be believed, very shortly, Twitter will start crawling the links that people tweet out and start indexing them. This will immediately take Twitter Search, which is currently a very basic service, to the next level.

Off late many senior people quit Google to join Twitter. Douglas Bowman (Design lead at Google), Dustin Diaz (An engineer working on Gmail) and Santosh Jayaram (VP of Search Quality) are some of the people we know.

There is no way Twitter Search will index as many pages as Google and there is no way Twitter will replace Google. This is because Twitter Search is meant to be a different kind of powerful search engine. Its gonna be more of a real-time search engine which will update itself and blend as per user response.

Following is a real-time search story from Santosh Jayaram which he used to illustrate the power Twitter Search: he told of being in the Twitter offices in San Francisco on March 30, when the Twitter engineers noticed that the word "earthquake" had suddenly started trending up. They didn't know where the earthquake was. Several seconds later, their building started to shake. The earthquake had been in Morgan Hill, 60 miles south of San Francisco, and the tweets about the shaker reached the office faster than the seismic waves themselves.

There are also talks of Twitter looking at ways to throw better search results. According to Santosh Jayaram, Twitter is looking at adding some sort of a reputation filtering to offer better search results. Now how this reputation filter would work, No one knows.