As Google’s search share approaches 85%, there is constant debate over who could possibly challenge them. Some mighty forces (e.g. Ballmer, Wales, Diller) have aligned against them, but the lead just keeps growing. I have seen the threat. It is Twitter. I have no idea if search is part of their soon to be announced business plan, but I sure think it should be. Searching Today
I do almost all searching in my firefox search bar. Recently I noticed that I am changing the settings there frequently. Google used to get 100% of my queries. Today, I bet Twitter is getting at least 10% of them. There are some things Twitter is just flat out better at for getting information than Google. Here are just a few: researching companies, products and services for real customer feedback, breaking news and live events/conference updates. It is not a total threat but Twitter is so superior in these areas that people will indeed make the effort to search somewhere new to get the information. I do. These are not net new searches either. Just today, I found myself wanting to get information on the to be released Audi Q5 (a candidate to replace my 10 year old acura). My first instinct was to search twitter to see if there was any news. Indeed there was: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=audi+q5 The same search on google was pretty much worthless. A month ago I would have just looked at Google. Can Twitter monetize this? Well, Google sure has. It’s all about the Data – Human Powered Search
So Twitter has value as a niche search engine today. Who cares? No one really. But, there is more. Twitter is building a human powered search indexing engine. It is an engine that will build better results than any rules based index and has gotten millions of people super motivated to contribute for free every day (even though they don’t know it). If you are a Twitter user you will quickly see this in action. The most common tweet is a link and some small insight. The value of this link and the insight (which is great context) is instantly voted on. Do people respond? Do people retweet? If so, relevance is very high. If not, well, it does not matter much. The system of followers is a market based system that guarantees integrity. If you simply use twitter to sell your agenda, it won’t be long until you have no followers. You become noise – that no one hears. All this is data that can be harnessed to create a search system around any topic. Let me give you an example. The Rackspace cloud division, Mosso, has a blog. If you type “mosso blog” on google, you get a link to the mosso blog and bunch of links to posts. I know for a fact that none of the links direct you to our most read post. I also know for a fact that Twitter knows what our most read post is. It was retweeted more than any other. They have the data. Google does not (or they have to look a lot harder to get it). This same information disparity exists across all sorts of potential queries. They have the opinions of millions of people on what really matters. This data is gold. If Twitter’s model includes some tax to using the system (as some have proposed), I think they are crazy. The more info they get, the more value they create. How will they use it? Well, we will see. But, if I was Google, I would be paying attention.
Update: follow up post given all the response and chatter on these ideas: http://lewmoorman.com/google-we-have-a-problem
