Twitter has added some new search features recently, which brings the keyword search bar to every Twitter page and also shows the most popular trending topics from across the site. These are features that you find on most social networking sites, so why is it such a big deal that Twitter has added them, years after initially launching its microblogging platform?
The potential of Twitter lies in search. As an ever-growing community of short updates, a great deal of this content needs to be better archived and accessed. It’s been difficult to do this from a user standpoint because of the missing or dismal search features.
Twitter has managed to survive so far largely in part because of the third party search engines that have cropped up specifically for Twitter users. Summize, one such third party search application, was eventually acquired by Twitter and soon became the Twitter search page. The problem with this page is that it was separate from the main Twitter site.
Even more recently, Twitter announced that it would start indexing links shared via tweets. This is really going to improve the quality of search on Twitter, and take the potential of Twitter as a resource to the next level. In indexing links shared through Twitter, the ability to redirect traffic out to web pages will be increased, and the power of Twitter’s aggregated data will become even more apparent.
The inherent value of indexed tweets within the Twitter community means that Twitter will not only become a resource for updates shared by users, but it will also become a resource for outside web content.
If you look at Twitter as a branded landing page for individuals and businesses, you’ll begin to understand Twitter’s ability to redirect traffic to other areas of the web. Even if you import feeds from other blogs, you’re redistributing that initial blog content in hopes of bringing that traffic back around full circle. The public format of Twitter is perfect for such redistribution. It makes perfect sense that Twitter would begin indexing these web links for larger search purposes.
Whether or not this is Twitter’s plan towards generating revenue or even becoming a more worthy acquisition target remains to be seen. One thing that’s not likely to happen is that Twitter becomes a powerful and all-knowing search engine, competing with the likes of Google. I think the power of indexing links will really lie in Twitter users’ ability to parse these improved search features for their own purpose, whatever that may be.
