Google is working on a way to search microblogging sites such as Twitter. But the news has led some experts to warn that such real-time searching might lead to a major flood of spam.

Twitter already has its own service allowing people to search any term mentioned by any user. However, while these people get almost instant updates of posts from other users, messages don't appear in search results until around 20 minutes after their original posting. Google, which updates in seconds rather than minutes, sees this as a market gap.

The independent site Google Operation System notes a line in some Google programming instructions which reads "This is the MicroBlogsearch (sic) Universal result group header text. A Microblog is a blog with very short entries. Twitter is the popular service associated with this format."

Google has confirmed it's interested in including results from Twitter in its searches, but has yet to announce any plans. (Source: blogspot.com)

Speed Plus Accuracy the Goal

As well as increasing the timeliness of results, Google might be able to improve the relevancy of the Twitter posts it selects. Twitter's own search facility appears to work simply by finding posts containing the search terms.

This has led to the unofficial user policy of marking posts on a particular subject with a "hash tag" such as #SuperBowl for comments during the big game. Users then search for this particular term. Google might do a smoother job of picking up posts that relate to a subject but don't use a specific term.

Spam Abuse Only a Matter of Time

Danny Sullivan of the specialist website Search Engine Land says the mass of information that is thrown up by searching all Twitter posts could cause problems, given that there's no time for filtering when producing instant results list. He told the New York Times that "Real-time search begets real-time spam." (Source: nytimes.com)