Twitter knows this is a problem though and has now publicly acknowledged that they're working on a solution. In an announcement today, the microblogging startup has revealed that they are experimenting with new ways to show higher-quality tweets within Twitter trends.
The change should not be very noticeable at first, and it looks like the experiment is limited to a small group of users. However, the result should be (hopefully) less spam when you search Twitter trends. This reminds us a bit of what Bing is doing with its integration of Twitter Search, although there is no indication that Microsoft is involved.
Here is the full blog post from Twitter spokesperson Jenna Sampson:
"As Twitter grows and the number of tweets each day continues to astound us, we’ve noticed an increasing amount of clutter in the public timeline, especially with trending topics. Trends began as a useful way to find out what’s going on but has grown less interesting due to the noisiness of the conversation.
So, today we're starting to experiment with improvements to trends that will help you find more relevant tweets. Specifically, we're working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful. The improvement won't be very noticeable at first, but this is a small step toward unearthing more value in search and getting you more relevant results."