by Search Copywriter
J. Morton
J. Morton
Since reaching an agreement with microblogging site Twitter and introducing real time search functionality in December, Google fans have been keen to find out how the Mountain View giant has been indexing tweets from the popular site. Having updated and refined its methods recently, the search engine has decided to share them with everyone. According to Google Fellow Amit Singhal, the relevance is determined similarly to how Google's PageRank function works: The search engine gauges a user and their tweets' importance by the link structure - in this case followers - and its quality.
"You earn reputation, and then you give reputation," Singhal said in an interview with MIT-based Technology Review. Through this, a relatively unknown user could achieve a higher ranking on Google just due to his or her connections in the Twitterverse.
"As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well," Singhal said.
The web maestro also commented that the phenomenon of 'hashtags' could potentially detract from a tweet's ranking, as they have a tendency to attract spam, presenting an apparent paradox for web users. Whilst hashtags expose other Twitterers to related content and increase prominence in-site, they may not help rankings in the Google search.
Other factors that could affect Google's tweet search include stand-bys from basic web searching: Key words will continue to play a role, as well as links from sites other than Twitter, overall content and recency of the postings.
The two companies are collaborating closely to optimise this service, according to one expert.
In the TR article, product manager of real-time search Dylan Casey stated: "I talk with the guys at Twitter on a regular basis to learn where the feature is going. We get feedback from them, we give them feedback, and our engineers collaborate. It is truly symbiotic."
With the development and popularity of smart phones, they are working to incorporate geo-positioning into search relevance in the future.
Recently, Google has reached similar agreements to offer real-time searching of other prominent social media outlets Facebook and MySpace.
