How Google Ranks Tweets
Algorithms judge the relevance of microblog posts containing 140 characters or less. — To deliver useful search returns from the so-called real-time Web—such as seconds-old Twitter “tweets” reporting traffic jams—Google has adapted its page-ranking technology …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google first surfaced real-time Twitter results in search back in March 2009, but how those seconds-old posts got scored was opaque. This week the company explains the mechanics: it has adapted its page-ranking technology so that 140-character tweets — traffic-jam reports and the like — can be judged for relevance like any other document.
The timing matters on both sides of the deal. Twitter just posted its highest usage day ever (January 12), while third-party measurements — unconfirmed — suggest its rapid growth may be flattening. And Google's Caffeine rebuild of its search index, announced in late December 2009, gives it the faster indexing infrastructure that surfacing fresh tweets demands.
First-order effects
- Individual tweets become rankable search assets: what users tweet can now determine whether they appear in Google results at all, turning Twitter posting into an implicit search-visibility activity.
Second-order effects
- The moment relevance signals are known to exist, an optimization economy forms around them — spammers and marketers will probe which tweet characteristics move rankings, forcing Google to keep tuning the algorithm against gaming.
Third-order effects
- If real-time results earn user trust rather than being skipped over, search structurally shifts from a static page index toward a hybrid that weights freshness and social streams alongside authority — with Twitter's data feed becoming strategic infrastructure Google depends on.
The trend: Web search is absorbing the real-time Web, with ranking algorithms rebuilt to score social posts by relevance within seconds of publication.