Guest col­umn by J.R. John­son
CEO, Lunch.com

Last week I did a sim­ple Google search. I was look­ing for an old arti­cle about “boot­strap­ping” writ­ten by a woman named “Mitra,” so I did a search for “Mitra boot­strap­ping.” The num­ber one result was from Twit­ter. It was a page con­tain­ing a sin­gle tweet by Ms. Mitra which men­tioned bootstrapping.

No big deal you say? Well, let’s con­sider a cou­ple of other things. Tim­ing and position.

First, she wrote the tweet only two weeks ear­lier and it was already the num­ber one result. If there was no other con­tent online match­ing my search, that would be one thing, but Ms. Mitra has writ­ten exten­sively about boot­strap­ping for her own blog, for Forbes Mag­a­zine, and she has writ­ten books on the sub­ject which are all over Ama­zon. Each of these shows up in the results, but all below the link to Twitter.

His­tor­i­cally, Google’s algo­rithm relies heav­ily on inbound links to help deter­mine if a page is impor­tant and there­fore where that page should rank in the results. This is a com­plex algo­rithm that Google is con­stantly tweak­ing, so by they time you read this, the results for the search I described above may even be dif­fer­ent, but the mes­sage to take away remains. The pri­or­ity that Google is giv­ing to Twit­ter con­tent rep­re­sents a major change to the way the algo­rithm has his­tor­i­cally worked. For Google to assign such a high pri­or­ity to Twit­ter con­tent, it must see Twit­ter con­tent as being extremely rel­e­vant and valuable.

What exactly is the con­tent being cre­ated on Twit­ter? I break that down into two cat­e­gories. First, there is the very pop­u­lar “I’m bak­ing brown­ies” cat­e­gory which is very sim­i­lar to the Face­book sta­tus update — shar­ing a mostly use­less fact about what some­one is doing or think­ing. The sec­ond, and expo­nen­tially more impor­tant cat­e­gory are those with links in them. For exam­ple, “I’m bak­ing brown­ies and here’s the link to the recipe I’m using.” That tweet just went from a mean­ing­less sta­tus update to some­thing that is actu­ally use­ful — well, sort of use­ful if you are think­ing about bak­ing brown­ies your­self at that very moment.

Google has spent its entire exis­tence try­ing to find and pri­or­i­tize all online con­tent, but they have never had the real time answer to their most impor­tant ques­tion: which con­tent is most rel­e­vant? Twit­ter gives them just that, a real time answer to what the most pop­u­lar brownie recipe is right now. It appears that Google under­stands the impor­tance of this and that is why Twitter’s pages are being indexed above more rel­e­vant and key­word dense pages like Ms. Mitra’s blog, Forbes and Amazon.

It will be inter­est­ing to see if Google begins to apply more com­plex algo­rithms to con­tent on Twit­ter, tak­ing into account things like num­ber of fol­low­ers, follower/following ratios, num­ber of Tweets sent, @ men­tions, or tweets re-tweeted, and adjust­ing the rel­e­vance of a given tweet based on those cal­cu­la­tions. Google can also take the rel­e­vance of a given tweet and then apply that rel­e­vance score to the under­ly­ing web­page that was linked to in the tweet. So as a user, if I searched for brownie recipe, I wouldn’t have to land on the Twit­ter page “I’m bak­ing brown­ies, here’s the link to the recipe,” I could just go directly to the recipe page.

This cre­ates an inter­est­ing dilemma. We have the con­tent cre­ator, Twit­ter, being crawled, scraped, and indexed by the search engine, Google, but Twit­ter may not even get the ben­e­fit of that in the form of traf­fic com­ing to Twit­ter. Google, on the other hand, will dra­mat­i­cally improve its search results by get­ting real time access to the most pop­u­lar con­tent online. Seems a lit­tle one-sided, so what does Twit­ter do?

How Twit­ter turns the tables

I’m guess­ing Twit­ter does noth­ing right now. It just keeps on being Twit­ter and watch­ing the num­ber of rel­e­vant, time-sensitive links con­tinue to grow. Google, and the other search engines, con­tinue to crawl, scrape and index Twit­ter. At some point in the future, Twit­ter con­tacts Google, along with Yahoo and Microsoft and lets them know that it’s build­ing its own search engine based on all of the extremely rel­e­vant con­tent that Twit­ter has on its site and will be block­ing all exter­nal crawlers. That would effec­tively cut off Google and other search engines from hav­ing access to all the index­ing infor­ma­tion on Twitter.

Next, Twit­ter becomes the most rel­e­vant search solu­tion out there and is able to fol­low the suc­cess that Google has seen over the last 10 years. This may be one rea­son why Twit­ter isn’t wor­ried about rev­enue right now.

J.R. John­son is the founder and CEO of Lunch.com, a social shar­ing com­mu­nity. He grew VirtualTourist.com and OneTime.com to suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies that he recently sold to Expedia.

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