Google's micro-blogging search engine

Coming soon: Google's micro-blogging search engine

It’s been talked about before, but now there is solid evidence that Google is building their own meta search engine for Twitter and other micro blogging sites. Micro-blogging is emerging as an extremely popular way for people to share real-time information with the world.

For example, as you can see on my Twitter, I just got the HTC Magic — but do random people really care? I’m not convinced yet that searching through tweets like “going to watch drag me to hell!” (which are the vast majority of tweets) is really useful — though I don’t argue there are certain times when it’s possible to bring back interesting real-time results.

Hints of this new search service are popping up in Google’s translation console, which is where Google harvests voluntary human translation services they use to make their products multilingual. The phrase they want translators to do their magic on was the following:

Recent updates about QUERY. This is the MicroBlogsearch Universal result group header text. A Microblog is a blog with very short entries. Twitter is the popular service associated with this format.

If you look at the screenshot posted by Ionut, this appears to be a part of the main Google search engine rather than a service by itself. Let’s hear what you think in the TalkBack!

Google prepares to launch a service that indexes and ranks content frommicroblogging services like Twitter. Since it's very easy to post updates and the posts are usually very short, micro-blogging services are great for live blogging, posting real-time information about an event.

Twitter's search engine has two important drawbacks: it's limited to Twitter and it sorts the results by date. While there are other search engines like Tweefind that try to sort Twitter posts by relevancy and search engines like Twingly that index multiple microblogging sites, none of them does a great job.

Much like Google Blog Search, Google's microblogging search service will sort the results by relevancy and it also be integrated with Google's web search engine: the keywords that are frequently used in recent posts will trigger a MicroBlogsearch universal search group.

Here's the description used in Google's localization service:

"Recent updates about QUERY. This is the MicroBlogsearch Universal result group header text. A Microblog is a blog with very short entries. Twitter is the popular service associated with this format."