Twitter Search - An early thought

I was a little disappointed with the news that broke last week regarding Google and Bing indexing Tweets. It seemed somewhat rushed and ill-considered. At the risk of being the same, I have held back my early thoughts until being jogged to do so by a couple of thoughtful pieces I read.



For a start, as a paid search practitioner by day, there was no sort of consideration for how this will impact on the PPC side, from a reputation-management point of view. I am an advocate of trying to get some sort of RSS capability into AdWords to allow for dynamism of the sort that can lead to PR mishaps (the phoney battle between Labour and The Sun via PPC of a few weeks back, for example, and the same newspaper's use of dead celebrities as a source of traffic), but which would present all sorts of opportunities if managed carefully. Bringing in Social Search would be easier to leverage with this sort of added versatility.

I also had high hopes for Twitter as its own, monetisable, Search engine. Twitter Search has suffered from being almost too real-time. Once a new topic starts trending, half the most recent tweets concern 'What is xxx?' and shameless use of it to try to garner more followers. My idea would have been to try to come up with an algorithm relating to the authority of the user, to split out authority from recency and then to present opportunities for promotion around a 'legacy' on Twitter. Tweets tend only to actually have a life as long as your followers' feed, or any retweets. Sure, there are over 5 billion tweets knocking about, but the actual shelf life is shorter. Adding a legacy to the tweets of those with 'authority' might create some actual value. Unless it was what Lily Allen had for breakfast.

@graemewood discussed the SEO implications for Brands of not being on Twitter - ie that they now have no excuse not to be and may miss out. He also points to the ability of Twitter to filter out the inevitable DR spam by its very nature.

As a further SEO consideration, I remember talk a while back about Twitter Search indexing the content of pages linked to in tweets. Unless I'm sadly mistaken I haven't seen any evidence of this, but if Twitter and Google could get something reciprocal going on, it might become possible within Twitter (possibly in exchange for some space to serve ads?).

Overall, despite agreeing with Graeme's assertion that essentially nothing has changed, I was encouraged, by @davidcushman, who wrote on Faster Future about the significance of Twitter in search. He emphasises the aspect of opening up the network and adding 'nodes', of the march that Twitter could be stealing on Facebook, and is generally very positive about the whole thing. I can't help thinking this is a great viewpoint from a theoretical perspective, and am going back to the drawing board.

Watch this space.