In recent days the spotlight has been on Twitter and rumored acquisitions of the micro-blogging company by contenders such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. Twitter’s founders, however, have pulled the plug on the speculation, saying the San Francisco-based company is not for sale.
“No. We are not for sale,” Biz Stone, Twitter’s cofounder, told ABC’s The View host Barbara Walters after she asked about the acquisition rumors.
While Stone and cofounder Evan Williams put the acquisition rumors to rest, Twitter Vice President Santosh Jayaram discussed Twitter Search and its future.
Twitter Search will be used to crawl information from links by Twitters to analyze and then index the content for future use, Jayaram, a former vice president for search quality at Google, told Webware. Currently Twitter Search is only used to search words included in tweets, but not words in links.
Along with its new crawling functionality, Twitter Search will also get a ranking system. When users do a search on trending topics — the top-10 topics people tweet about, which get their own link on the Twitter sidebar — Twitter will analyze the reputation of the tweet writer and rank search results partially based on that.
Updates to Twitter’s search functionality were expected, since Twitter has access to a lot of data and needs to find a way to get revenue. Twitter’s founders also hinted about such functionality when they first announced Twitter Search.
“Twitter teaches us new and amazing things every day, and a big lesson learned is that search is so much more than a box and a button,” according to an official Twitter blog post. “As public tweets fly in from around the globe, we analyze them to detect when certain words or phrases occur with higher frequency.”
The company added that the trending phrases surfaced on the Twitter home page…