Google Indexes Twitter: Why We Should Be Cautious

Google has revolutionised how the internet is organised to the extent that Google search is practically an index of the web. 

Nielsen’s recently announced search engine traffic rankings for December 2009 emphasise Google’s dominance, albeit that they account for web traffic in the US only. 

According to the statistics, Google ranked first with second placed Yahoo receiving more than 30% less traffic; Microsoft lie third with just 9.9% of Google’s traffic. 

Google search is so crucial to companies that it has spawned the search engine optimisation industry, SEO: the art of positioning a website favourably on Google search results. 

The inevitable has happened after Google announced its plan to include messages from Twitter in its search results - Google is now ranking tweets. The company has “adapted its page-ranking technology and developed new algorithmic tricks and filters”, so says technologyreview.com. 

According to the same article, Google claims that it can keep its Twitter search results relevant by scanning news headlines, blogs, and feeds from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other sources. 

Reputation is the key to deeming a Twitter user valuable rather than simply number of followers, but one has to question exactly how a reputation is established, particularly for users who do not boast thousands of followers reading their updates. 

Google Fellow Amit Singhal says: 

“As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well." 

The worry is that reputation is traded between the established Twitteratti (leading Twitter users) instead of discovering new, previously little known users. 

With the Google ranking system unveiled there is the possibility that it may, at some stage, become public in the same way that Page Rank is for blogs and websites.

The effects of this would likely be “gaming” of the system to manipulate a higher reputation, in the same way SEO optimises Google search.  

If anyone was unsure of the power of influence on Twitter, technology guru Leo Laporte recently revealed that he had been offered USD 2,000 by Sony and ad.ly to tweet one advert. 

Of course Twitter already has gamers who work towards assembling enormous followings but with Google involved the stakes would raise significantly.