Is Twitter's search finally going to become a Google Killer?

In the recent past, "realtime" has become one of the most overused buzzwords around (right up there with "social" and "community"). And nothing realtime has been more talked about than search.twitter.com.

It's been touted as a Google killer, though in it's present state Twitter's search is an entirely different beast. For one thing, it currently only indexes their own content. That, however, is going to change soon.

Santosh Jayaram, former Search Quality VP for Google has joined Twitter as VP of Operations. According to Jayaram, a couple big changes are coming to search that will make it much more of a killer than it is right now.

First, Search is going to start crawling links that appear in tweets. Let's face it - there's not nearly as much important information in someone's 140 character message about a web page as there is on the page itself. Crawling the sources Twitter users are buzzing about will add much needed context to Twitter's index.

Second, a reputation system is going to be created - and it will no doubt take a lot of work to get it right. The goal is to downplay less valuable tweets (like retweets) and emphasize more worthwhile content.

Will these changes make Twitter a real Google killer? Probably not, but it's certainly going to make the tool much more useful and relevant.

[via WebWare]