Both Bing and Google yesterday announced that Twitter posts will now be included in their indexing activities. The relevancy of this is in my opinion beyond doubt, especially in trending topics where search engines have suffered while they wait for the blogosphere to catch up. However, is Twitter really ready for this kind of pressure to be placed on it? Twitter is still developing and refining it’s service and at the same time is constantly having to update and create strategies to cope with abuse and spam. There are a stream of ever more sophisticated ways in which the service is being used to pump out spam and malware and while Twitter are pretty quick to quash large scale attacks they have still not got a framework in place that is effective before the spam is created. This is where my concerns come in. With search engines now rating and using Twitter in search results the pressure from these less salubrious activities could quickly escalate to a point where it cripples the service and ruins the user experience. This could eventually reach the point where the relevancy of indexing the items will be deteriorated.

Now I imagine this is pretty obvious to all parties involved and the protections built into the search giant engines will no doubt mitigate this to some degree, still I worry for Twitter. After all it has it’s own search capabilities and that is where I go if looking for information from tweets – What do the big boys offer over and above this – or rather why does Twitter benefit from this?

Now I would expect that in the fairly near future we will see Twitter’s independence whittled down by these tie-ups, although I was probably as surprised as Microsoft by the non-exclusivity of the arrangements. As mentioned earlier realtime search is the next battleground for Bingle to take on and social networking in general is going to have to toughen up to the pressures this will put on them – tbh I would prefer them just to leave Twitter alone so I can carry on my 140 character stream on consciousness in peace ;)
Lombear
http://www.bing.com/twitter
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/rt-google-tweets-and-updates-and-search.html