Twitter is looking to become a Google competitor in real time search by announcing plans to build a search ranking algorithm. The algorithm will assign a “reputation” score to certain tweets and use this to deliver the most relevant results to searches.

Currently, search.twitter.com simply performs a text match and returns all posts that mention the keyword you’ve searched for. The down side of this is that for popular terms, many times you will just see re-tweets and low value content from hundreds or thousands of users. By assigning a ranking system to these results, you’ll be able to see the most meaningful results first.

The changes were announced by Santosh Jayaram, who recently joined Twitter after managing search quality operations at Google. Jayaram said that not only will Twitter launch a ranking algorithm; they will also begin scanning the links included within tweets and start indexing this content.

This could see Twitter become a serious competitor to Google in the field of real time search. By indexing external links it will help to make twitter a more complete index about what’s happening in real time across the web.