Google May Scan Twitter Feeds

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Google searches reference works, blogs, news sites, images, videos and much, much more. And since the company’s stated mission is to “organize the world’s information” can tapping into popular microblogging services like Twitter be far behind?

Apparently not, at least according to the unofficial blog Google Operating System. In a weekend post, GOS said Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is readying a service that would search and index Twitter feeds. Google already offers separate search services focused on News and Blogs, and GOS says a microblogging search along these lines is in the works that would search results by relevancy and could also be integrated with Google’s Web search engine.

While Twitter itself offers search, results are sorted by date. Also, Google’s search service would include other microblogging services such as, in theory, FriendFeed.

Google had no comment directly on the blog post. In recent months, there have been rumors and reports that Google was in discussion to buy the fast-growing Twitter, though those were never substantiated.

Google has acknowledged the growth of real-time
information sources and a constant push to present the latest (but also most relevant) information in its search results, however.

“At Google, we strive to connect people to all the world’s information, and this includes information that’s frequently updated such as news sites, blogs and real-time sources,” the company said in an e-mail to InternetNews.com. “While we don’t have anything to announce today, real-time information is important, and we’re looking at different ways to use this information to make Google more useful to our users.”

The GOS post said that, much like Google’s Blog Search, Google’s microblogging search, which the blog said might be called MicroBlogsearch, will sort the results by relevancy and it will also be integrated with Google’s Web search engine.

There are several third-party companies that already offer different approaches to searching Twitter specifically. Within Twitter itself users can group relevant “tweets” by using the hash (#) tag. So, for example, #Iran in a Twitter search will show you the latest tweets on that topic.

There’s also a site called hashtags.org that lists the most popular hashtags along with trend information and other information from the most recent to historical.

Enterprise search vendor Exalead has a service called Tweepz that lets you search Twitter by geography, biography or name. You can also filter results by criteria like language and key words.

The company has also said that in the future, it may additionally index the recommended site links or URLs that are often included in tweets.

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com.