At a panel being moderated by WebWare’s Rafe Needleman, former VP Search Quality at Google Santosh Jayaram announced that Twitter is to start crawling and indexing the links people place in tweets.  This move is a game changer and catapults Twitter in the heat of the search battle.  No longer will Twitter simply provide a stream of tweets, but it will also have access to a massive body of human approved, quality web pages – in real-time!

Jayaram also mentioned that Twitter is working on a reputation system.  Searches for trend topics highlighted in the sidebar will use this reputation metric to partially rank results, bringing more authoritative tweeters to the top.

Lets just hope that Twitter has time to make good on these promising features and isn’t acquired by a jealous Google.