There is something about Twitter search that makes people ga-ga about it. It’s called real-timeliness. While Google search shows what’s been around for a longish time (in the internet sense of the word), Twitter can show you what’s the latest, right now kind-of-stuff.

However, one point is completely being missed out in the debate of aged-content Vs fresh-content. And the point is that PageRank algorithm, when applied to Twitter content, will give better results as compared to when it is applied to whole of web.

Let me explain.

PageRank algorithm essentially computes the popularity of a piece of content in the context of some keywords. So, there are two aspects: popularity and the context of keyword. Let me take them one by one:

1. Popularity: It is measured by finding out how many other pages link to a particular page. Not all the links are considered equal. If a link comes from a domain that itself has a lot of incoming links, it is considered far more valuable compared to the domain which doesn’t have much of incoming links. This is in effect a mimickry of the reputation system that’s prevalent in the society. If a highly reputed person praises you, that praise is worth more than the praise from a less reputed person. And the reputation is a function of how much praise you eventually get.
2. Keyword Context: So, when a link is made to a webpage, it is made within a context. That’s the keyword context. Technically, it is called the topical relevance of a link. What it means is that if I praise you and in my praise I say that you are very helpful, the keyword helpful gets attached to you. If I say you are very artistic, the word artistic gets attached to you.

Now, let’s see how this PageRank algorithm applies to Twitter.

The popularity of a link can be measured by how many times it has been published on Twitter. Moreover, more the followers of the person who tweets the link, more the brownie points for that link.

The keyword context for the link is the entire tweet. A tweet itself is so short, that it the message enveloping the link has high topical relevance.

All in all, the PageRank algorithm when applied to Twitter will give very good results.

Let’s see who is the first one to exploit this

By the way, for a more in-depth understanding of this subject, check out the trail on Search Engine Optimization. Though the primary focus is SEO, it still has good content on understanding how the search engines work.