by Bill Ives
April 5, 2009 at 5:38 pm
· Filed under FASTforward'09
Steve Rubel recently posted, Twitter Search Traffic Poised to Eclipse Google Blog Search. He wrote, “As of February, Twitter Search attracted 1.35 million users while Google Blog Search, which has been plagued by relevance issues, sits at 1.38 million users.” Now this is impressive for Twitter search but I am sure there is no comparison to Google web search. I never use Google Blog Search since blogs show up quite well on Google web search and you get a more complete picture. So, if my actions are at all typical I am not surprised that Google Blog Search is flat.
I have recently started using Twitter search for a variety of reasons. I use it primarily to search on topics and not to find mentions of my own work or presence. I have other tools for this purpose that pick up Twittering (e.g., Techrigy and Filtrbox). But Twitter search is useful to look at what is being said about events (e.g. FastFoward 09) or issues (e.g., knowledge management aka KM).
Steve closes with this important thought, “Keep an eye on the social search space. It’s not a short-term threat to Google, but it certainly represents a major shift in where and how we will search for relevant news and information by layering in trusted sources.” I think this is the future of gathering content from the Web, the mix of trusted sources with topic search. This concept goes beyond the importance of individual cases like Twitter passing Google Blog search.
Permalink
Indeed, if Google should be worried about Twitter, the threat comes from Twitter's success at building community, not from Twitter;s access to better content or superior search functionality. Social search is an interesting space. But Twitter has a ways to go before it before it truly enables social search. If you're interested in the space, keep an eye on startups like Aardvark and Hunch.
http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/04/05/google-alre...
Indeed, if Google should be worried about Twitter, the threat comes from Twitter's success at building community, not from Twitter;s access to better content or superior search functionality.
Social search is an interesting space. But Twitter has a ways to go before it before it truly enables social search. If you're interested in the space, keep an eye on startups like Aardvark and Hunch.
Wired carried an article with a good summary of current search efforts — titled "Wikia Death Proves Google Is Search-Startup Killer" the article makes some good points on the future of search.
See http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/04/wikipedia-...
PS! Twitter's advanced search feature has some very useful features; I like the near: and within: options.
I just noted your post here, Bill, as I was commenting to a piece Oliver Marks did on Google: Web 2.0 Expo: the end of the online search driven era? http://blogs.zdnet.com/collaboration/?p=460
This is pointless. Twitter is used for blogging hence people searching for blogs. It is like searching for televisions on a supermarket website compared to searching for televisions on an electrical website. Plus what are the figures for googles overall searches? I do not see this affecting the future of searching.
The reason why Google is eyeing on Twitter, simply because of its massive traffic and the ability of going viral with the messages. Absolutely what publishers would love: massive publicity and page impressions from it, so, I wouldn't be surprise to find Google Adsense somewhere on Twitter page/gadgets once it has the control over Twitter.
The networking created from Twitter is superb, the real time search and communication is a big plus for business and staying in touch. Let's hope no big changes on Twitter, but somebody really has to do something with the occasional technical errors in it.
» Subscribe to the RSS feed for these comments
HTML-Tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Additional comments powered by BackType
