Twitter Search Leaves the Nest for Linked Pages !!

Those who are looking for Twitter to finally hit a revenue-generating home run may have to settle for a series of singles and line-drives instead. The microblogging service keeps rolling out new features that may eventually add up to a business model -- the latest examples being the ability to search Web pages through links embedded in tweets, and to rank results based on reputation.

Twitter's new vice president of operations, Santosh Jayaram, mentioned the new features during a Wednesday panel discussion at TIEcon, a conference for enterpreneurs in Santa Clara, Calif, according to a Cnet report.

Twitter will soon add the ability to search data within the links that users send to each other, said Jayaram, who was formerly in charge of search quality at Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) More about Google. A recently added feature, trending topics -- the most popular subjects that are the focus of user tweets -- will also be ranked according to the reputations of senders.

No launch date was set for the new features; indeed, Jayaram said his company's developers were still hard to work on them. However, when they arrive, they may bring value to Twitter in three ways: setting it up as a competitor to Google in real-time search; making Twitter an even more attractive acquisition target; and providing a path to monetization...