How Does Google Rank Tweets?
By Anna Johnson on January 25th, 2010Now that Google is including real-time search results in its search engine, you might want to know how its algorithm evaluates Twitter tweets and other instances of the real-time online ‘conversation’. Here are a few clues from Google Fellow and real-time search lead, Amit Singhal…
In a recent interview with David Talbot, published in MIT’s Technology Review, Amit Singhal said that Google ranks an individual’s tweets based on not just the number of their followers, but also on how reputable those followers are.
That’s right, just as Google looks at the authority of back-links when ranking a webpage, it similarly considers the ‘authority’ of Twitter followers when ranking someone’s tweets.
In addition to the number and reputation of your Twitter followers, Google also takes into account the use of hashtags in your tweets. According to Amit Singhal the less you use hashtags the better, since Google regards hashtags as indicators of lower quality tweets.
In evaluating tweets, Google also looks for the ‘signal in the noise’. In other words, if there are many, many tweets on the same subject matter, Google strenuously looks for the freshest tweets on the topic.
Apart from Google’s plans to incorporate geo-location data in ranking tweets, that’s all Amit Singhal was willing to disclose. While it’s not exactly earth-shattering, the news does confirm what many in the real-time search community have suspected…
Source: David Talbot, “How Google Ranks Tweets,” MIT Technology Review, January 13, 2010
