Written by Christian Georgeou of Search Engine Watch, producers of the Search Engine Strategies San Jose Conference & Expo.
As Twitter has exploded onto the online scene, its search capabilities and usability has generated a constant hum of buzz in the search world, as on lookers try to gauge its implications for Google. Â
Albeit basic at its core thus far, searching keywords over the most recent user tweets, Twitter's search has excited some as results are generated not from static sources but from fresh user generated content. Now seemingly ready to become a staple inuser interaction (and possibly enter the wider search engine competition?), TwitterVP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram reported to News.com that Twitter search willsoon be crawling links and formulating ranks based off an algorithm. Â
Small Business Ownersto RejoiceÂ
Advances in Twitter's search engine should have small and local business owners' giddy with excitement as a powerful outlet to reach their local markets grows ever stronger. MichaelBoland of SearchEngine Watch in a recentarticle described how some local businesses are effectively using the service, gauging chatter about their products and market specifically to their local niche and develop a focused following based on interested and/orgeography. Â
With a more advanced search platform to work with, local businesses will be empowered with cleaner more relevant search results (not lists of retweets). The new ranking algorithm which is planned also looks to go beyond just relevancy in search results to also measure user reputation and trends in topics. If successful, this will prove to be invaluable to businesses already focusing on brand building, and targeted behavioral marketing. Â
Shaping Up to theCompetitionÂ
Boland does point out that Google spiders are quick to index new content in just a few days, even hours of being posted; more than adequate for traditional product research. While Twitter's search capabilities are still years away from those of major search engines of today, Twitter taps into a critical niche of trends as they happen now. While traditional search engines index in hours, Twitter functions within minutes capturing news as it happens real-time.Â
As search habits of the online world evolve, it will beinteresting to see if the direction user habits are adopting now will make Twittersearch the future, or just one component of a larger world.Â