How Google Ranks Tweet in Search Result? (2)
To deliver useful search returns from the so-called real-time Web–such as seconds-old Twitter “tweets” reporting traffic jams–Google has adapted its page-ranking technology and developed new algorithmic tricks and filters to keep returns relevant, according to a leading Google engineer.
One problem with tweets is that people often lard them up with so-called “hashtags.” These are symbols that start with a pound sign (#) followed by a word that represents a very popular current topic, such as “Nexus One” or “Earthquake” or whatever else might be a trendy topic at the moment. When a hashtag is included in a tweet, the resulting tweet will show up when other Twitterers click the hashtag’s topic word elsewhere on the site.
While such tags can usefully maximize exposure of a tweet, they can also serve as red flags to lower tweet quality and attract spam-like content, Singhal says. While he wouldn’t get into details, he said Google modeled this hashtagging behavior in ways that tend to reduce the exposure of low-quality tweets. “We needed to model that [hashtagging] behavior. That is the technical challenge which we went after with our modeling approaches,” Singhal says.
