Google engineer sheds some light on how our tweets are ranked, and whether they will show up in real-time search.
From Technology Review.
Under PageRank, Google judges the importance of pages containing a given search keyword in part by looking at the pages’ link structure. The more pages that link to a page–and the more pages linking to the linkers–the more relevant the original page.
In the case of tweets, the key is to identify “reputed followers,” says Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, who led development of real-time search. (Twitterers “follow” the comments of other Twitterers they’ve selected, and are themselves “followed.”)
“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely, Singhal says.
Watch video interview with Amit Singhal.
