Will 'Deeper' Twitter Search Be More Shallow?

It's exciting that Twitter plans to extend its already impressive search function beyond the text of Twitter posts (or "tweets"). The rapidly growing microblogging service "will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages," CNET's Rafe Needleman explains:

This will make Twitter Search a much more complete index of what's happening in real time on the Web and make it an even more credible competitor to Google Search for people looking for very timely content.

Sure sounds like it. But here's where I begin to worry:

Twitter Search will also get a "reputation" ranking system soon, (Twitter vice president Santosh) Jayaram told me. When you do a search on a "trending" topic--a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar--Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that.

Jayaram did not say precisely how reputation will be calculated; he indicated that engineers are still figuring that out. But this, again, will make Twitter Search more valuable.

The concern here, of course, is that every time Robert Scoble, Kevin Rose or Guy Kawasaki weigh in on a trending topic -- which they will, and frequently -- their pearls of wisdom (or shallow observations) will float to the top of every search. And thus the power and influence of that small circle of Twitterati will be reinforced. (If Oprah and Ashton Kutcher start showing up on Page 1 of the new, improved Twitter trend searches, someone please come and kill me.)

I'll reserve judgment until I see the new Twitter search service in action, but I can't say I'm overly optimistic about the ranking system.