Google Set to Add Microblog Search

Evidence suggests that Google will soon introduce a “MicroBlogsearch” feature, indexing and searching Twitter and its imitators, Ars Technica reports. Google-watchers noticed a reference to the new feature hidden in Google’s translation service. Unlike Twitter’s own search, which seeks out any and all tweets containing the search terms and displays them chronologically, Google will seek to rank the links by relevance.

How it will do that while dealing with 140-character tweets is unclear, but last month Google said it was looking into ways to extract trend data from Twitter. “What’s really happening in Twitter is that there are a lot of clues in it in terms of what’s happening that’s interesting overall,” said Google’s head of search products. “We can make predictions off of that.” (More Google stories.)