Google Uses Follower Numbers to Rank Tweets in Search Results

The real-time web has been making waves for the best part of 2009 and many were quick to herald it as a crucial component for the future web. Recently, it looks like those voices may have gotten it right, as both Google and Bing have introduced real-time results, mostly from Twitter, to their searches. Google, in particular, has made quite a splash and the real-time results box often shows up on the search engine. So much so that many were curious just how Google determines which tweets to promote and when. It turns out that the company uses an algorithm not a lot unlike PageRank, as Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, who led development of Google’s real-time search, told Technology Review, one of MIT's tech magazines.

"'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. It is 'definitely, definitely' more than a popularity contest, he adds," the publication writes.

For its main search engine, Google uses a complex algorithm to determine relevancy dubbed PageRank. Pioneered by cofounders Larry Page, who lends his name to it, and Sergey Brin, the algorithm has evolved over the years, but at its core it, takes into account the number of links pointing to a particular web page but also the 'quality' of those links.

Similarly, in order to determine which tweets should make the cut and show up in the search results, Google looks at the number of followers a user has but also at the value of those followers. "One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation," Singhal tells Technology Review. "As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well."