Twitter quietly added two new features on Wednesday, "top news" and "top people" which make it easier for users to see a real-time search results.

Select users were able to use these two features which have both sections at the top of the search results about a relevant topic. For example type in a hot story like the iPhone 4s, and you'll see a highlighted boxed result with relevant news stories or blog posts about the topic. The same procedure works with "top people" where if you type the name of the person you're looking for you'll get their Twitter profile, if they have one or people who follow them.

The new feature "top news" is especially interesting to Twitter and to other news organizations. Twitter has already established itself as the social media platform for news. Twitter feeds can drive viewership and propagate news faster than traditional media. Remember the firestorm about Steve Jobs death where there were 10,000 tweets about the story in an hour. Other huge media events have been tweeted about. Twitter even played in disseminating information about real-time events like the Egyptian revolt or the riots in Britain.

With the "top news" feature, publishers and news organizations will be jockeying to get the top spot in the Twitter search. Much like Google's search function, those sites that rank high will see a lot of traffic from Twitter's millions of users. This is a huge step for Twitter and if it decides to make top news a paid service it could generate a lot of income for the site. Publishers and news sites will pay a lot of money to generate enough traffic for their site. Twitter could actually deliver that traffic.

It's still not clear how Twitter will rank the top news or top people. With Google, there was page rank which resulted in SEO among other things. Twitter could rely on the number of re-tweets or followers but it will remain to be seen how this will impact search sites like Google.