Twitter is currently planning to improve their search, by implementing a number of technologies that will make the service more reliable. And as proof that they really want to improve this very important part of their service, they have employed a new VP of Operations, in the person of Santosh Jayaram. Jayaram was previously VP of Search Quality at Google.

Twitter Search can currently only look at the text of a Tweet, but Jayaram has confirmed that they are now implementing a way of making the system to also crawl the links that are included in tweets and that Twitter Search will start indexing these pages as well. This will make Twitter Search a worthy opponent for Google Search, at least for those users that are searching for recent content.

Another bad thing that happens when you search for something on tweeter is that your results will include a lot of retweets and even more results that have very low value. This is why Twitter Search will soon be based on a reputation ranking system. Every time you will perform a search on a topic that gets its own link in the Twitter sidebar (this means it is “hot” at the moment), you will get results based on the reputation of the users that posted about that topic. Although how this reputation ranking system has not been figured out by the team, when this will happen, it will be a great thing for Twitter Search, a service that has been lately criticized by both the public and specialists because of the irrelevant results it returned.

Jayaram has also pointed out that Twitter search is currently used by a lot of people and that it reflects events from around the world in very little time. To further strengthen his point of view, he told a real story that has happened on March 30:

While at the Twitter offices in San Francisco, Twitter engineers noticed that more and more people begun searching for the word “earthquake”, but they did not know where the earthquake was. They found out in a few seconds, when the building begun to shake. The earthquake originated in Morgan Hill, only 60 miles south of San Francisco. The topic had begun trending before the earthquake reached their office.

It is a very impressive story, and the immediacy of twitter search is mainly the reason why we are glad Twitter will improve their search system. It remains to be seen how the new systems will be implemented, but it is most likely they will provide a better experience for all of us on Twitter.