From MIT’s Technology Review:
The tweets are a mainstay of Google’s real-time results, but Google has not previously discussed how it ranks them. A fundamental Google strategy for identifying tweet relevance is analogous to that used by Google’s PageRank technology, which helps find relevant Web pages with traditional Web search. Under PageRank, Google judges the importance of pages containing a given search keyword in part by looking at the pages’ link structure. The more pages that link to a page—and the more pages linking to the linkers—the more relevant the original page. In the case of tweets, the key is to identify “reputed followers,” says Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, who led development of real-time search
Twitter is the next big search engine and they know it. Real time search is great. I find Twitter Search is becoming as useful as Google for a lot of the the stuff I’m looking up. If they are planning to index the pages that people link to, it would be phenomenal. They have to figure out a way to keep out the spam crap but it sounds like they have some smart people on board to work out those algorithms. Neat stuff.
