This Week in Google and Authority

I listened to the Leo La Porte's most excellent This Week in Google Podcast this weekend. One of the things discussed was some of the new social search engine tools announced by Bing and Google (Google Social Search Announcement). The goal of these tools is to index and search your social net tools. Things like Twitter feeds and Facebook walls would be indexed in near real time. As you might imagine this could be some pretty cool stuff.



The discussion also goes into ranking the authority of posters. Would you rank someone's tweets based on followers for example? Something similar to the Google page ranking algorithms. Thus, the person with the most links would be the most authoritative. In my opinion, the problem is a little more complex than that. Because in the Net world, there really isn't a single authority for everyone. Who Leo considers authorative, or Gina, or I, could be completely different. This makes the problem a little more interesting. Anyway, cool stuff. If you have a chance, check out the episode.