Twitter is about to unveil a major revamp of its search capabilities. New features will include a links search and ranking by ‘user reputation’.
Twitter Search currently searches only the words within tweets, but changes have been made to the algorithm, meaning that searches will be able to include the links people have tweeted, as well. The Twitter crawler will visit the links, index the page and correlate the 3rd-party content with the Tweet, which should help give more relevant Twitter search results.
The updates will also mean that while currently, Twitter Search finds keywords based on the text of the most recent Tweet and uses only this to decide the order of results, in future it will be able to rank results for trending topics according to ‘user reputation’, or the popularity or the Twitterer, as well.
The changes to the Twitter search engine were uncovered by Twitter’s VP of operations, Santosh Jayaram, previously the VP of Search Quality for Google. He hopes that the changes will remove some of the duplicate tweets which currently appear on Twitter Search and ensure that the results that do appear are more relevant to the search.