Twitter in Web Search

It is interesting to see how twitter users are ranked in search engines. By searching for 'site:twitter.com' on live search, the top 5 accounts are:

1. Barack Obama 562k  followers
2. Jonathan Ross (Wossy) 169k
3. Biz Stone 248k
4. Pete Cashmore (mashable) 300k
5. ev 339k

Google has quite a different story. A search for 'site:twitter.com' produces the following accounts ranked from the top:

1. Andy Tarczon 213
2. Nadia W. 51
3. Ryan Stewart 4, 500
4. Zna Trainer 5, 281
5. Matt Haughey 3, 491

There appears to be a clear difference in ranking criteria. Googles' top ranked Twitter users are 2 orders of magnitude less 'popular' in terms of followers.

It is also interesting to look at the latency in the crawl. We can do this by looking at the cache pages for the accounts. Jonathan Ross' cached page on Live Search is from Feb 17th, Google's cache of Andy Tarczon is from March 2nd.

Web search engines are going to have to figure out what to do with Twitter. Certainly it is of huge value as a feature for ranking other content. Is it useful to index individual tweets? or accounts?

Comments

[Daniel Tunkelang]

While I'm skeptical about the number of followers as a reliable indicator of authority or influence--of course, I'm partial to TunkRank: http://tunkrank.com

Nonetheless, it's clear that Live's list is more meaningful than Google's. Not sure how all of those Twitter user pages received a PageRank of 7. I don't suppose anyone from Google would care to enlighten us?

[JustinSMV]

I have been noticing lately how SEO ranks with Twitter and I must say Twitter has some good google juice...at least for now

[Patrick G.]

Why should Search Engines care about Twitter and how can they?

Neither the number of followers nor the amount of tweets gives any indication about how important the information is for someone querying Google, Yahoo or MS Live Search, apart from initially finding a person's account name.

If you want the busiest or most followed people, just use Twitter itself or search one of the webpages that provide that kind of statistics.

And since most people don't use search engines to access Twitter (once they found a person's feed), how should search engines gather and analyze informations for ranking them?

Twitter is by design a system that lives inside it's own "ecosystem", creating informations with strong dependencies on the person writing or following, their locality, the feed's context and most importantly the time/frequency the tweet written & read.
In such an environment, I don't see how a search engine could ever distinguish important from irrelevant, apart from ranking twittering people by their general/website popularity.

I mean can anyone decide if the information that "Barrack Obama" "listens to some R&B on the Ipod" is more important than the same information from "Andy Tarczon"?

My Conclusion: You can't objectively rank something so subjective as Tweets.