A few weeks ago in a galaxy far, far away, Rebel Troops and the Empire decided to put down their starships and fight out their epic battle like men, in a foosball game. Or, at least that is what I'm guessing is going on in this impressive Lego Star Wars foosball table by Flickr user 2x4. Said to be playable, the table should allow you to settle any dispute you might have with your mates (epic or not), or at least be a fun leisure activity.

Amazingly, this isn't the first Lego foosball table that we've seen around here, however however it does appear to be the first one to stand on it's own brick-laden legs. [via technabob]

This is about to change. According to CNET, Twitter’s new VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram, said that Twitter search will soon start crawling the links included in tweets. There’s a lot of links there, and given Twitter’s huge growth, soon these links might comprise a hefty portion of the overall web, making it a much more complete search engine that it currently is. It’s a big technical leap, but it shows that the folks at Twitter are serious about search.

Jayaram gave another very interesting hint at where they’re going: Twitter Search will also get a reputation ranking system. That means that not all tweets will be equal; rank will be calculated for each twitterer, probably based on several criteria such as number of followers, number of retweets and so forth.

When I recently wrote about Tweefind, a Twitter search that also takes rank into account, some commenters asked why are we putting so much emphasis on a very beta, buggy service. Well, regardless of the actual implementation, it was immediately obvious that the idea is not only great; it’s precisely what Twitter needs.

This other part of Twitter’s search strategy is equally important, and together these might prove to be the one-two punch they need to put some fear into their competitors. Crawling links will give Twitter’s search engine the scope it needs to compete with Google. Rank will give it a way to make sense out of all that data and decide what’s important.

At this point, it’s hard to say whether Google’s complex algorithm, initially based on the number of inbound links of a web site (Google’s legendary PageRank) will stay superior to Twitter’s algorithm which is based on real people’s conversations. But even if Twitter’s search proves to be superior in just a portion of the search market - and it already looks that way in certain cases - it will be a very important dent in Google’s seemingly impenetrable armor.

Reviews: Google, Twitter

Tags: Google, Search, twitter