Twitter Search to Become Real Search like Google?

Tweefind Applies Google Magic to Twitter Search








Remember how GoogleGoogle reviews conquered the world of search? They figured out a way to tell which web sites are more important than others, by judging how many links are pointing to them, and called it Google PageRank (it’s a bit more complex than that, but it was one of the key parts of Google’s search algorithm).

Now, Tweefind is doing something similar for TwitterTwitter reviews. It’s a Twitter search engine which returns results based on rank, hopefully returning more relevant results and users on top.

Rank is calculated through several parameters. Creator of Tweefind, luca Filigheddu, lists them:

# followers
# following
# of tweets
# of RT he/she receives
# of replies
# of distinct users who reply
# of distinct users who retweet
# of RT he/she makes
# of links the user shares

This approach raises some interesting questions. Are Twitter users with more followers, tweets, replies or retweets more relevant in the context of real time one-to-many conversations? Is there really a “rank” on Twitter that can be calculated and be useful in real world usage? Could an approach similar to Google’s PR algorithm do for Twitter search what it did for Google?
These questions are definitely worth answering. Yes, if there’s something important happening right now, a quick Twitter search will return a lot of tiny tidbits of info on the subject. But I often feel overwhelmed with the abundance (and similarity) of the results, and I wish there was a way to sift them and find the really relevant tweets.

At the moment, Tweefind does not seem to calculate rank for enough users to answer this question, but in time its results, when compared with standard Twitter search, might prove to be very interesting. Tweefind is also one of those Twitter-related services who are having a go at monetization; in this case it’s a couple of Google ads on top of the page, which luckily aren’t too big of a distraction from the site’s content. If it goes in the right direction, it’ll definitely be a service to watch in the future.