by SEO Consultant
R. Falconer
R. Falconer
Without a doubt, where the real value is in Twitter is its database. Steven Fry can tweet about his underpants and you can check what Matt Cutts' cats had for dinner. This sort of thing is currently giving Twitter a huge profile, helping to make the site popular in the short term. Twitter is riding that wave for now, despite the inevitable backlash from people sick of hearing about Twitter this and tweeting that.We reported in February that Twitter is looking at ways to monetise the site and speculated that using the search facility would be their best option for doing this. The most successful model yet for making money on the web came via search after all and Twitter has the potential to create a very different and innovative search engine with the resource they have already built.
Twitter is going to start crawling and indexing the links that people tweet, just as a "normal" search engine does. This means when a user searches for a term, the search results will not just provide a constantly changing list of tweets containing that term but will also include search results for the most relevant pages that have been tweeted - presumably with some reference to the actual message that contained it.
It goes without saying that this would be a quantum leap for Twitter, putting it in direct competition with not only the major search engines but also with social bookmarking sites such as Digg etc.
How Twitter will go about ranking the pages is not known. Presumably relevance to the search term and the number of users who have tweeted the link will be important but with the real-time, ever changing nature of Twitter, temporal factors will no doubt be a key element to the algorithm too. There's also the possibility of introducing a Digg style vote for pages you like and / or introducing a system of authority, whereby links posted by users who have "authority" will be more likely to rank higher on the search results.
If their search takes off, the next step Twitter will have to take is monetising it properly - the big question is, will they develop their own Google Adwords style system, use someone else's or develop a completely different model?
One thing is clear, Twitter is only at the very start of an interesting road that could end up in a big change in functionality and focus for the site. The success of this change will depend on how well Twitter can market itself as a place for people to go to search for things.
