Microsoft just recently announced that they have started indexing tweets from popular Twitter users in their Bing search engine. Google and Yahoo have been indexing Twitter profiles, however I’m not aware of them yet indexing tweets. All 3 major search engines are looking for a way to integrate social media into their search engines, however it remains to be seen how it can be done while still maintaining the integrity of the search results. Personally, I see Twitter as being most problematic — if you start ranking tweets high in the SERPs, people are going to exploit this and try to make money off of it. With the large majority of search engine referrals resulting from first page search engine results, is there an alternative to ranking tweets high in the SERPs? If you don’t rank them high in the SERPs, you might as well not rank them at all, as is quite clear from usability studies on the behaviour of search engine users. It’s not uncommon for news to break on Twitter well before anyone has time to write an article on the subject, so there’s clearly value in being able to deliver this fresh news to search engine visitors if they’re able to get around the spam problem.

Honestly, I think Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft will need to radically change their search engine algorithms before this can be done effectively. All three of them can’t seem to find a way to rank results without looking at links — they’ve gotten better than they were in the past and now discount unrelated links, however have links ever been the best indicator of what’s a good website? Wikipedia dominates the SERPs on pretty much every keyword worth ranking for, including many which it’s highly unlikely people are looking for when they enter a particular keyphrase (eg. Wikipedia has 2 results on the first page of Google for “sex”).

What about tweets, diggs, stumbles, etc – shouldn’t these count as a vote just as a link does? How should they be weighted? Clearly they shouldn’t be weighted as much as a link, however I think 5000 retweets is a better indicator of website quality than a handful of links from mediocre websites  More and more people are choosing to tweet valuable information to their Twitter followers rather than link to it on websites — this alone will ruin the accuracy of any link-based algorithm. Google really hasn’t helped things in this regard, changing the way nofollow is handled which has further encouraged people to not link out to other websites. If social media votes continue to increase while linking decreases, it will eventually be nearly impossible to displace top rankings for competitive keywords.

Related posts:

1. Real-Time Search
2. Real-Time Search and Social Media
3. Goodbye Yahoo Search