Twitter is serious about search
For most of us we still wondering if Twitter is all that. Personally, I see more value in it as a resource tool and not really to grab the attention of potential clients, simply because consumers aren’t hanging around twitter to make their next purchase. It is filled with self promoters showing off what they have to offer or bored people telling us that they are scratching their arm.
Like it or not though it has embraced the global village, turning it into a hub of conversations… and let me tell you that it is addictive…
As I said, I’ve been using Twitter as a resource tool to find information. Usually I read an article in my inbox, if it’s cutting edge news I go to Twitter search because it’s the most up to date search engine out there. I do a quick scan as to what the most credible people in that particular industry (usually SEO = Matt Cutts) are saying. Unfortunately, you still get rubbish because Matt Cutts isn’t always online to tweet so that “quick scan” turns out to be a hour of searching.
My point is we have to issues here; Google vs Twitter. Google has the credible search results but the result is not real time. Twitter on the hand is not all that credible but produces real time results.
This is all about to change according to Santosh Jayaram, who until recently was vice president of search quality for Google. Jayaram confirmed that Twitter Search, which currently searches only the text of Twitter posts, will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages.
Twitter Search will also get a “reputation” ranking system soon. When you do a search on a “trending” topic–a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar–Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that.
I am not sure how this grading will work but Twitter Grader seems to have a good understanding of it. They analyse the amount followers one has, how many retweets you have together with how many people you follow. So I’m sure Twitter will create a similar algorithm to Twitter Grader.
At this point, it’s difficult to say whether Google’s complex algorithm, initially based on the number of inbound links of a web site (Google’s legendary PageRank) will stay superior to Twitter’s algorithm which is based on real people’s conversations. But even if Twitter’s search proves to be superior in just a portion of the search market – and it already looks that way in certain cases – it will be a very important dent in Google’s seemingly impenetrable armour.
If Twitter can perform the miraculous and change the face of search engine optimisation, all companies interested in online exposure need to start taking Twitter seriously and starting adding value to their Twitter profile.
Tags: Twitter
May 8th, 2009 at 10:33 am
amazing stuff thanx
May 10th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
A most informative article. How do you suggest a database company like ours goes about leveraging Twitter in order to increase exposure to our website via real-time tweets?
May 11th, 2009 at 9:09 am
Hi Kosta
A database company like yourself could implement Twitter for two reasons.
1) Customer Service
2) Newsletter/article releases
I’ll touch on the article releases because that is what this article is more about. When Twitter launches an algorithm that can index articles which are posted onto Twitter feeds then obviously your you want the best give yourself the best opportunity to appear in the top search results when someone searches with a keyword related to your industry.
Jayaram also mentions that the new algorithm will be based on your Twitter ranking. How you can increase your ranking is by providing quality content so people will follow you. Based on Twitter Grader’s ranking system (I’m guessing Twitter will work on a similar algorithm) it measures how many people are following compared to how many people you are following. SO if you have a 1000 followers and you are following 900, your Twitter ranking may not be that great but if you have a 1000 followers and you are only following 20 then you will be marked as credible and influential. So always check who is following you, it’s not always a good idea to feel obliged to follow someone just because they are following you.
If you want to be successful in Twitter you need to stay focused with regards to what you share. If you start writing that it’s a beautiful day and you are scratching your head then people will get frustrated with you and “unfollow” your feed.
I work on the following ratios:
60% resource (post links)
40% social (interacting with people)
NOTE: Don’t be afraid to post links on articles that weren’t written by you. Also retweeting is also a good way to build friendships and trust within your Twitter community.