Twitter’s vice-president, Santosh Jayaram, spoke on a panel moderated by Webware’s Rafe Needleman last night about the future of Twitter search in a way that truly captivates the imagination:

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.

Twitter Search will also get a "reputation" ranking system soon, 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.

Just when I start to think that the powers that be over at Twitter have forgotten all about me, things like this come to light that almost exactly mirror the sentiments of folks like Sean, Steven and myself when we reiterate that the true value of the “real-time web” lies in the search and filtering side, rather than a scrawl of unending Matrix-like noise.