May 10th, 2007

How Will Twitter Affect Search?

by Scott Karp

Blogging and search have been good to each other overall. Bloggers have cranked out millions of links, which drive search algorithms, and in turn search has rewarded bloggers by ranking their content high in search results, which is to a large degree a function of bloggers giving each other so many links. (Blogging platforms like Google-owned Blogger are also a vehicle for spamming search engines to generate Google AdSense revenue, but that’s another story.)

What I’m wondering is — how will Twitter affect search, and what will search make of Twitter?

Much of the hype over Twitter has characterized it as short-form blogging. But if you look at a Twitter pages and see all the messaging going on (e.g. @thisguy), it appears that Twitter is as much if not more a form of public instant messaging.

Nonetheless, many prominent bloggers are channeling content into Twitter instead of their blogs. Jason Calacanis announced he was taking a month off from blogging but would continue to post to Twitter. Looking at Jason’s and other Twitter pages, the content on these pages raises a number of interesting issues for link-driven search algorithms:

1. Links from individual Twitter pages on the Twitter.com domain

Twitter.com already has a PageRank of 8 out of 10. Jason Calacanis’ blog has a PR of 7. But Jason’s Twitter page only has a PageRank of 3.

2. Use of TinyURL for links

With 140 characters per post, many Twitter users are using TinyURL. Here’s one of Jason’s Twitter posts:

how much equity do digg shareholders get in Kevin Rose’s 3rd startup? :-) http://tinyurl.com/25l4gc

3. No anchor text for links that use the direct URL

Twitter doesn’t permit the use of HTML. From Jason:

davewiner on podcast device… http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/cn30Apr07.mp3

4. Little surrounding context for links

Again, with only 140 characters, there’s not much room for keyword rich context. From Jason:

i love http://www.thefunded.com/

5. Fewer links overall

Many Twitter posts make references to ongoing Twitter conversations, with no referring URL. From Jason:

doesn’t that guy have a non-compete or something!?! whoever did his employment contract please call me… I want that deal!

and also from Jason:

@Genuine: that webpage showing AdSense earnings is FALSE/MISLEADING. I didn’t make $100k a month in ADSENSE.. WEBLOGSINC DID…w/ 75 blogs!!

6. Not much linking to Twitter posts

You rarely see one Twitter post link to another because the assumption is that everyone has added each other as friends and that everyone is following the conversation. Twitter posts also contain so little information that there is little reason to link to them from non-Twitter sites. So with no links in, it will be more difficult for search algorithms to determine the value of links out. So on the rare occasion that a Twitter post does contain useful information that someone might want to find, it will be difficult for that information to rank high in search results.

Twitter may represent a new paradigm for online communication and information sharing, but it’s definitely not enriching the link-driven semantic web.

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Topics: Collective Intelligence | Google | Search

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Comments (5 Responses so far)

  1. May 10th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
    Teresa Valdez Klein

    I think the big fuss over Twitter is what it represents in the future, rather than what it is at present. At the moment, it’s little more than a series of instant messages/away messages. Facebook effectively cloned it by adding RSS feeds for friends’ status updates.

    Individual tweets have “permalinks” but nobody links to them. They don’t have titles, tags, or categories, so they’re less relevant to search. But as we see further boostrapping of the Web via interoperability of blogs and social networks, features like Twitter really will begin to enhance the semantic Web because they’ll be put in context by meta data from other, linked sources.

    Did that make any sense, or did I just string together 8 million buzzwords?

  2. May 10th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
    Scott Karp

    Teresa,

    That does make sense — Twitter is indeed less semantic in a vaccum, but possibly more so when integrated with other content. But I still think it’s affect on linking habits and patterns on the web will be interesting to watch, given that links are what drive the web.

  3. May 11th, 2007 at 12:18 am
    aliza sherman rants and raves

    How Will Twitter Affect Search? » Publishing 2.0

  4. May 11th, 2007 at 1:48 am
    Memories Reloaded ::

    건데, 모바일에서 생성되는 페이지들은 다른 페이지를 참조하는 링크를 웹보다 훨씬 더 적게 걸기때문에 구글의 페이지랭크같은 로직이 웹보다 잘 먹히지 않는다고 한다. 오늘 스콧 카프는 “트위터가 검색에 ì–´ë–¤ 영향을 줄까?” 라는 글

  5. May 11th, 2007 at 9:57 am
    Crossmediale Kommunikation

    How Will Twitter Affect Search? (Publishing 2.0)

  6. May 11th, 2007 at 10:15 am
    Seamus McCauley

    I wonder why people are using Tinyurl rather than Qurl? Sure, it’s just three letters they’d be saving but when you’ve only got 140 characters and the point of the exercise is to optimise them it all counts!

  7. May 11th, 2007 at 10:43 am
    thoughtplay

    Interesting - though Twitterers can save themselves three more characters by using qurl.com…

  8. May 11th, 2007 at 11:09 am
    Brian Clark

    Not to be overly flippant, but the people who use Twitter are only going to eliminate their own echo chamber from the search results, which is a good thing.

  9. May 12th, 2007 at 8:23 am
    Shall We Zen

    How Will Twitter Affect Search? » Publishing 2.0

  10. May 12th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
    Plod

    发送更新。不过 twitter mobile 上显示 twitterfeed 抓取的非 unicode 编码的中文 feed 好像还是乱码居多。 　　上次在《泡唠》创刊号中提到 twitter 没有搜索会怎样，这里有篇文章是专门讲 twitter 将会如何影响搜索引擎的，不过在这些之前，也许我们可以向这位老兄一样用 twitter 告诉大家巨大的射电望远镜在星空中搜索什么

  11. May 14th, 2007 at 8:44 am
    Newsvine - blog

    [IMG Comments][IMG ]

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