Lot of ’Twitter-as-search-engine’ buzz out there all of a sudden. Here are a few key reasons Twitter is a lot of things, but it is no more a search engine than Digg or Wikipedia is, no matter how much you like it. Feel free to try to prove me wrong.
13 Comments
13 Comments
Comments
Yeah, but it is a Recommendation Engine. And very it is effective too.It can likely steer traffic for certain types of internet usage completely away from Google and anything they can track.
Finally! Someone else who isn’t absolutely out of their mind. Twitter is not an f’in search engine it is a "micro-blogging" site that has a search feature. Excellent post!
Dude, after I started treating Youtube as a search engine, traffic to my site doubled. However, some competitors post nasty insensitive comments.
See, I completely disagree. The content is so limited in both scope and robustness that without some serious changes I don’t see how it possibly steers significant traffic from Google or any other engine. I can see how people might supplement their main search engine queries with a trip to twitter to see if anyone’s saying anything about it.But at 140 characters the posts don’t contain near enough information to satisfy most searches or provide enough depth for more than a cursory glance at opinions on the topic. The URLs that get utilized aren’t immediately transparent and the search functionality has nothing to do with relevance - only recentness.Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like it’s nothing more that a TripAdvisor or Digg. Nothing wrong with being either of those, they’re awesome and drive some killer, monetizable traffic. But I don’t see how it’s going to be an engine killer or even an engine threat by any stretch.
See, I think YouTube is completely different story and I’m with you on YouTube as a search engine. It’s a unique content forum (video vs. copy) with a much lower barrier to participation than twitter and something that’s naturally shared and used in a lot of different media.Plus, one can catalog a huge chunk or even a majority of the world’s videos in one place, especially if you make it to market with sharing capabilities first - but one can’t catalog most of the world’s full opinions in text and link form (especially when those forums already exist), and it’s certainly not going to be accomplished in 140 character blocks.
*** Twitter is not an f’in search engine it is a "micro-blogging" site that has a search feature. ***<div></div><div><div></div><div>*** But at 140 characters the posts don’t contain near enough information to satisfy most searches or provide enough depth ***</div><div></div><div></div><div>You’re not getting it. You don’t "search" twitter, you ask ’the cloud’ and get almost immediate answers and recommendations back.</div><div></div><div></div><div>See also: http://www.webmasterworld.com/social_media/3862502.htm</div></div>
I’m agreeing with you that it can be a valuable tool for a lot of different things; the big question was whether or not it qualifies as a search engine as was proffered by ’experts’ all day yesterday, on which I heartily vote nay.Now, whether the information that you get from Twitter is always very valuable or helpful, especially on the kinds of searches that are being suggested as potential targets for takeover by the twitter ’cloud’ from search engines, is a whole other ball of wax. A ping of this information gets you a collection of posts that may or may not be related to what you’re intending to search for.For example, when you ask the cloud about Dallas Hotels as was mentioned in one post, very little comes back that’s actually related to Dallas Hotels in the way of answers or recommendations - especially ones that aren’t from spam accounts:http://search.twitter.com/search?q=dallas+hotel...which was one other argument against classifying it as a search engine that Google etc. should be wary of. A potentially valuable tool, monitoring device or gauge of some variety? Definitely. In a position to really change how people search? Not so much, and definitely not in its current form.
Twitter isn’t a search engine, but it’s definitely being used in search engine-like ways. I have a story coming off my survey soon that will make this very clear. And you can still take the survey:http://searchengineland.com/twitter-search-alternative-poll-16786
I’ll be fascinated to see the results - think you can guess how I voted on mine a few days back : )Thank you, looking forward to it!
True, but we use it in a similar manner. Yahoo ignores upstart Google and then finds that it is losing market share. Microsoft could have use their cash back in early 90’s to build a kickin’ search engine, but instead they focus on desktop software.
Add this greasemonkey script to your firefox which shows twitter search results at the top of your google results and you may change your mind.
...and I invite everyone to give it a shot.Though given that Google and Yahoo also include, say, News results in the same way automatically, should we consider Google News a search engine, too? IMO, tremendously valuable and an interesting supplement, but content and search engines that gather content are still two completely different things.I, for one, still vote nay, though it doesn’t mean that twitter still can’t make a billion dollars or a huge difference being a communication and content platform instead of a search engine...
MORE people drinking the Kool Aid! This one microblogging (which Twitter actually is) just doesn’t sound cool enough to describe it:http://econsultancy.com/blog/3406-is-twitter-a-search-engineTwitter can still be cool and useful without having to be a search engine, people!