8th
Hey @Google - @Twitter To Start Indexing Links For Search
(and more here)
A somewhat shallow post at TechCrunch about Twitter search evolving, but there are some interesting bits in there. Everyone likes to compare Twitter search to Google, but of course they’re complementary. Thinking about twitter indexing content (not just tweets) is interesting. They have the advantage of a “push” indexing model, where users deliver links to them, rather than having to crawl to discover new content. As the linked-to post points out, it won’t be as complete as Google’s index, but it *might* be more fresh — at least for some portion of the web that’s interesting to Twitter users.
Most likely, Google makes heavy use of two types of data outside of the documents when ranking — links & anchor text from other documents on the web, and usage data from queries that result in clicks on the document. If Twitter indexed page content, this would the a third type of external data to use in ranking. How much information does this provide that’s not already taken into account from anchor text & query-clicks?
