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In today’s real-time web, searching is king.  Google/Live.com/Yahoo/Wikipedia are the new household names, but typically when someone tells you to “google it”, you know what they mean.  Where I love the fact that between the four above sites (not necessarily in that order) I can prettymuch anything I’m looking for online, there is still usually a time delay that can range from a few hours to a few months depending on what the site tells engines to do.

For as long as I’ve been in the business this was just something you accept.  When you want a realtime search for things based on Blogs, Articles & More you would head to Technorati. But with the rising popularity of Twitter (and specifically their sexy new search), this completely changes things.

As a business owner, you can follow users who are posting about their thoughts on your company or need for your product, as a hobbiest you can see the latest and greatest with what you like to do, and as an average geek you can follow trends and watch what you’re internet rockstar heros care about.. all in realtime. Now with the inclusion of their search also indexing outgoing links, this really shows they mean business.  I look at it as the Sprint Now Network of search.

It may seem like a simple thing, but when your mind needs to work like mine as a programmer it opens more doors than the Keymaster in The Matrix 3.

Hey @Google – @Twitter To Start Indexing Links For Search

Twitter Search is easily the most promising aspect of Twitter. People talk about mundane updates, or connecting with companies, or following celebrities — but that’s all small scale. The real power of Twitter lies in its aggregate data. Why do you think Google and every other company out there is interested in them? It’s not just because they are the hot ticket in town right now, despite what some would have you believe. It’s all about the data. And Twitter knows that too — and is apparently on the verge of some interesting moves with Twitter Search that will better highlight that.

Speaking on a panel today, Santosh Jayaram, Twitter’s new VP of Operations, had some very interesting things to say, Webware’s Rafe Needleman who moderated it, reports. The most interesting thing is that Twitter Search will soon begin crawling the links that people tweet out and indexing them. This immediately takes Twitter Search, which is still a very basic service, to the next level. This means that no longer will it just be a stream of textual tweets, but it will include millions of web pages as well — web pages that are more or less already curated by the individuals who tweet them out. Sure, there will be some spam, maybe even a lot of it, but this user curation should help real good content from around the web bubble up.

Apparently, Twitter Search will index the content of these pages as well. Yes, this is what Google does. So it should be no surprise when I say that Jayaram was the former VP of Search Quality for Google.

What are your thoughts on search today, how does something like this matter to you when it comes to things your looking for?