Twitter’s new lists may be just as important to Twitter (and Google) to help give an idea of who people are, essentially asking people to “tag” their followers. The two main things that could help add relevance to Google’s search in the near future are:
Number listed: If someone’s on a lot of lists, then others must think they’re worth categorizing and adding. (On the other hand, not everyone’s making lists, either).
List name: Name of the list is a great indicator of topic. If you’re on a list about iPhones, chances are you and your tweets are a relevant source on iPhones.
Now, do you think Google could use some sort of TweetRank, like Google’s PageRank, to determine relevance of a tweet for a particular topic? Could Google crawl through Twitter and it’s users and assign value to a tweet or user, and pass along to a website or 140 character bit of info? Here’s some thoughts on where it might get some of that data:
Keywords in tweet: Naturally, the tweet has words equal to or related to a topic.
Number of tweets/retweets: More people talking about it, greater relevance (at least for the time being).
Links in tweet: Links in a tweet pointing to pages about the topic.
Brand concentration: If there are a number of brands in a topic (such as “Flip” in a sea of HD camera discussion that brand would stand out and should be more relevant).
Followers: It’s reasonable to assume that a larger number of followers would mean more influence. However, there are still accounts (specifically spammers) that have a large follower count and there are services that help you gain followers usually by just following back (like link farms/trading links just for the purpose of the link itself, no matter the relevance)
Follower/following ratio: A higher ratio of followers to following should indicate a person of interest and trust. However some people/companies follow everyone back that follows them, so there’s that to take into account.
Frequency of tweets: The faster a topic spreads the more interesting/relevant it should be. This could be interesting though. If something get popular but dies off as fast it’s different than something that’s more gradual.
Related followers: If you’re followed by a large number of people that are in a particular industry and tweeting about a particular topic, your tweets about that topic should be more relevant.
Your profile: Including name, description, website and location, all (hopefully) provided by you. (The downside from Google or Twitter’s view is that they’re all provided by you, and should be qualified by some of the other data).
So, do you think Twitter users will have a “TweetRank” of sorts? In the sense that, based on some factors like above, your tweets carry a different value then someone else?
I think Google will or has built an algorithm to establish the relative importance of Tweeters. But I don’t see tweets in the SERPs (realtime results) being very useful. What I do think will happen is Google will use Twitter’s realtime results to rank sites related to important / trending topics. So, when you search for “Tiger Woods” you get TMZ for the first few hours ranked number 1, then the Google News OneBox takes over as major news sites pick up the story. Then, after a day or two the traditional algorithms catch up and whoever has written the most authoritative page on the topic will hold the top spot. As the hubbub dies down and search volumes return to normal (and people tweet about the next celebrity death instead of Tiger) then TigerWoods.com can regain the top spot.
Realtime results will influence search, but won’t replace pages in the SERPs. Tweets don’t tell the story, they link to it, and they’re never the final destination.
Totally agree. I’m sure Google is working on it constantly, but determining the searchers’ intent and showing realtime results is tricky, seems to be ok now but like you said not all that useful. The real bead and butter will still be in the regular SERPs, for while yet I think.