Microblogging has become a very popular way for people to share news and information or even live-blog events in real time, but if you have ever tried to search through services like Twitter using only Google, the Twitter native search or any number of other services, you know how difficult it can be to find exactly what you’re after. Today the Google Operating System blog reports that Google will be launching a new microblogging search service that will sort results by relevance and integrate those results with its own web search engine to trigger a “microblog universal search group”, closely related to the way Google Blog Search works. If it turns out to be true, this is great news to those of us who constantly search Twitter for the latest news and trends.
Of course, you can always search Google in real-time with our favorite Greasemonkey script called, “Realtime Twitter Search Results on Google”
While Google has not confirmed this new search engine just yet, the company’s search products chief Marissa Mayer hints that there may have been something like this in the works at Google for some time now: “…we are interested in being able to offer, for example, micro-blogging and micro-messaging in our search. Particularly in Blog Search and possibly in Web Search, but we don’t have any particular plans to announce”. The Google Operating System blog points to this description used in Google’s localization service as further evidence that there is something going on. It is allegedly a phrase that Google wants translated to be multilingual:
“Recent updates about QUERY. This is the MicroBlogsearch Universal result group header text. A Microblog is a blog with very short entries. Twitter is the popular service associated with this format.”
This is not proof-positive that Google is developing a microblogging search engine, but it makes sense that they would. Twitter and other microblogging platforms are rich with information could be used to rank messages. Reportedly the search results will appear based on frequently used keywords or current events, but a whole bunch of other factors could play a role in providing relevant results. The number of followers a person has, the author’s authority in Twitter’s social graph, replies, re-tweets, posting frequency and other stats could be used. We hope Google is paying attention to current microblogging trends and will include those results in any microblogging search engine it may or may not be working on.