Late Wednesday evening, we heard TechCrunch and Cnet discuss news of some very cool changes coming Twitter… changes you’ll want to know about. Ex-Google VP of Search Quality, Santosh Jayaram, is Twitter’s new VP of Operations, which in and of itself should tell you where the super hot social media company is focused.

During the TiEcon 2009 TweetUp focused on Twitter and LinkedIn, Jayaram “confirmed that Twitter Search, which currently searches only the text of Twitter posts, will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages.”

This is huge. Twitter search results will no longer be limited to tweets. You’ll get external web content as well. And you’ll have access to search content almost instantaneously due to the immediacy of Twitter. In other words, if its’ been linked to on Twitter in the past 5 seconds, you’ll probably find it through search.

Not only will Twitter be more of a legitimate competitor with Google for timely search content, Twitter Search will also see an implemented reputation ranking system in the very near future. This is important because it assigns a reputation value to the person tweeting, thus potentially reducing the amount of retweet spam by non-influential or spam accounts. Though Twitter employees are still working on the reputation-determining algorithm, it essentially sounds to be similar to PageRank, where links from quality external sources can give more weight to a particular website.

There are some very, very cool doors that could open with these moves. We’ll offer up a speculation or two next week in part two Cool New Twitter Changes You Should Know About. Of course, we’d love to hear your thoughts and theories as well.

Stay tuned.

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