iEntry 10th Anniversary
RSS
Newsletter
Advertising
I don't look for real-time search to replace traditional search. I can see it being used frequently for certain searches though. Like mentioned in the article...things like blog search, news search, etc. And when somebody wants to find truly up to date info, they could conceivably turn to Twitter over Google. In fact, I'd say there are quite a few people doing so already. I'm not looking for this to come in and replace Google. You do make some good points above though. Particularly regarding the "mom factor" and the need for more integration of apps.
17 commentsMonday, May 11, 2009
By Chris Crum
Earlier this year, Twitter began integrating Twitter Search (formerly Summize) into its home page. Just about a week ago, it became available there for everybody.
But that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is what lies ahead for Twitter search. From the sound of it, it's about to get taken a lot more seriously. According to CNET, Twitter's new VP of Operations Santosh Jayaram says that Twitter Search, which currently searches only the text of Twitter posts, will soon crawl links included in tweets, and index content from those pages. What do you think about that? Tell WPN readers.
Add Yourself to the Twitter Yellow Pages.
Gain new followers fast with Twellow.
Join 3.5 million people and businesses.
"Twitter Search will also get a reputation ranking system soon, Jayaram told me," reports CNET's Rafe Needleman. "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 search results in part based on that."
Twitter search has been quite useful as it is. I've written about this in the past. For businesses, it has been a great tool for finding potential leads, and managing your online reputation, just to name a couple.
For the general public, it's provided insight into what people are talking about right now, it's often broken news stories, and it's provided a way for people to connect with others who may have something in common with them (although Twellow is more specifically designed for this).
But with changes coming to Twitter Search, it's going to be a whole new ball game. We're talking about Google territory. Twitter is adding algorithmic ranking, perhaps similar to Google's Pagerank. It sounds like Twitter will be bringing an altogether new ranking concept to Internet search by using the number of links in tweets as a value statement on the web page.
This is taking real-time search for web pages to a new level. And let's also not forget that Jayaram used to be the VP of Search Quality at Google.
What Twitter is doing could compete with Google News search, Google Blog Search, Google video search, and in terms of recent content even Google's main search engine.
Is it going to come out and immediately dethrone Google? That's probably not going to happen. For one Twitter users still have a hard time convincing people why they should be using Twitter at all. Everyone already uses Google, and even if another search engine were delivering better results, people would still be using Google. That seems to be the problem Microsoft is having (it is their claim that people found their results as good or better than Google).
"Strategically, a more advanced search engine could give Twitter more appeal as a takeover target - Steve Ballmer, for example, is making noise about how Microsoft has to get more disruptive in search," says Buckpost at Twitterrati. "Better search could also jump-start Twitter’s business by providing more relevance and targeting for advertisers."
Interesting point. We are still waiting on that revenue machine Twitter's going to unload on us.
Either way, Twitter is clearly branching out beyond the simple social network/public IM/microblogging/etc. platform it has become known as. It has been in the search conversation for some time (even as a possible test for Google), but now you might start finding it there for greater reasons.
What do you think about Twitter's search plans? Tell us.
Do you think Twitter will cut into Google searches significnatly? Why? Why not?
Do you think Google will improve its own real time search capabilities enough to stamp out any threat? Share your opinion.
Publish A Comment
| Popular WPN Business Resources |
 |
 |
|
|
|
-
Goodbye Vista, Hello Windows 7
Microsoft released its latest edition of Windows on October 22nd to... -
Social Media Trends That Indicate the Future
Where are we going with social media? That question is asked very... -
Time to Get Serious about Social Media
According to Chris Brogan, the President of New Marketing Labs, we...
     |
Doubting Thomas
First, I am not sure that a real time search and Google should be compared as I believe the use case models to be very different. I am always saddened when I hear news of Google looking at moving to timed search. It always worries me.
I often tell someone, hey you can find site X at Google by searching these keywords "*". If that ability was gone in favor of changing results, a lot of sites would lose traffic and a lot of information would no longer be transferable. (This is one of my issues with personalized search as well)
But back to Twitter.. aside from just attempting to beat larger brands like Google I see there are several potential issues -
1) Twitter has to become an application where you can do on its own pages what you can do in the third party downloads. I mean you cannot even RT on it currently. Until this is possible, my belief is adoption rates will be low. I call it the mom factor. If mom cannot understand it AND find a use for it, it will not make the mainstream.
2) Twitter has to become a better development company. Twitter has numerous issues now and it basically just a data post and retrieve system. Imagine how it will be once it is downloading web pages and information and trying to write algo's to sort and retrieve. IE the programming behind Twitter right now is not very extreme and they have a lot of regular issues. To enter this market, they will need rockstars and people like Google has on staff. Entering the real time search market is much more difficult and complex than just scraping, posting and retrieving information.
3) That leads me to my final issue of Twitter as search engine. Once you start collecting that data and trying to find authority, esp in a real-time system, you have to be able to continually monitor for issues of spam, malicious code attacks, hackers, spammers with illegal methods etc etc etc... Right now, given the issues Twitter has managing a simple application, I see that a Twitter search engine could be a serious security issue. Unless they step up their game - are bought by someone with game or hire the rockstars away from the established engines, my guess is the Twitter engine will be fraught with issues that will end it before it begins.
However, I could be completely wrong :)
I do hope though - however it goes - real time search is seen as a NEW and ADDITIONAL model to traditional and not where we are going. I will have little need for real-time search. It might be interesting, but for school and work and even personal interests I need established models that produce consistent results, so I would be happy to see a TWITTER version of something like a GOOGLE REAL TIME as a sub of Google, but not everyone moving to this real-time model.