Why Twitter Will Challenge Google in Search

I have recently tackled this subject for another great publication that I write for and have many further thoughts on the synergies and differences between the search functions at Google and Twitter. First of all, no doubt that Twitter is the hotter of the two properties right now, and that there is just a general market buzz for the brand. The recent addition of Oprah Winfrey to Twitter along with Aston Kucher's breaking the 1 million followers barrier have created a much broader media awareness of the service.

In search, however, the two properties are quite different. Consider these differences:

Twitter is a micoblogging service whose primary mission is to learn 'What people are doing right now' - Google is attempting to 'organize the world's information'. Google has search as a primary mission - Twitter has search as a convenience to users.

Google is a public company which has been making an enormous amount of money for its investors - it is currently worth around $130 billion. Twitter is a private start-up funded by venture capital with an estimated market value of $250 million according to TechCrunch.

And maybe the biggest difference of all: In order to use Twitter and be part of the conversation you must be a logged in user. In other words, a member - bound by terms of usage and Twitter's decisions about what you have to say. Google is organizing a much vaster pool of knowledge - the entire Internet. There are no membership rules or terms and conditions that apply.

So which may be better suited to which types of queries?

If it's on the Internet (pretty much anywhere) - then Google has it covered. If you want to know what people are saying about something right now (in the past few hours or even days) then Twitter will work well for you. If you want quantifiable - black and white - sort of scientific answers - Google has them. If you want people's opinions on things - Twitter works pretty well.

You may know as I wrote about here at HostReview in April that I really began to consider the implications of search and Twitter when TechCrunch reported on a pretty unique use of Twitter. From the original piece: ''One very interesting use of Twitter was recently reported by website hosting provider, 34SP.com. The UK recently suffered through some of the most extreme snow storms in the past 20 years. The BBC and TechCrunch reported that as soon as the snow began to fall, there were Twitter mashups that appeared to track the storm progress. One such application was created by 34SP.com customer, Ben Marsh. Mr. Marsh's application enlisted the general UK Twitter population to report on the snowfall at their location in the UK. Respondents reported their postcode and then selected a number from 1-10 to rate the snowfall amount. The mashup then graphically displayed the results using a Google satellite map of the UK. This produced a real-time graphical map of the snowfall amounts as reported by people who were actually there on the ground.''

When I first heard about this mashup I thought to myself, ''Hey - this is the very best information on snowfall available. It should be the very first result when someone searches for snowfall amounts during the storm.''

Another piece to the Twitter search puzzle is the addition of the search box into the right hand navigation of the Twitter interface. Just a very few days ago Twitter published a post on the official Twitter blog entitled, ''Twitter Search for Everyone!''. The post explained that ''Every public update sent to Twitter from anywhere in the world 24/7 can be instantly indexed and made discoverable via our newly launched real-time search''. Additionally a new save search feature was added.

One other recent development that looks to put Twitter more closely into the Google search fray - CNET is reporting that ''Twitter Search which currently searches only the text of Twitter posts, will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages.'' This along with a new reputation system that categorizes tweets by authority and diminishes the huge amount of background noise from ''junk tweets'' will pose a serious challenge to anyone trying to get fast information. And fast is the key (or maybe recent is the better way to phrase it). Consider this story relayed by Twitter's Vice President Santosh Jayaram (from the CNET piece), ''He told of being in the Twitter offices in San Francisco on March 30, when the Twitter engineers noticed that the word "earthquake" had suddenly started trending up. They didn't know where the earthquake was. Several seconds later, their building started to shake. The earthquake had been in Morgan Hill, 60 miles south of San Francisco, and the tweets about the shaker reached the office faster than the seismic waves themselves.''

Here are a few more resources to view on this subject - which I'm certain will develop into a full scale search battle soon.

Here is the Twitter search feed for the term, ''Twitter search''.

The article I mentioned previously entitled, ''Will Twitter Replace Google in Search?''.

Great research from SearchEngineLand.com on ''How We Search With The Twitter Help Engine''.

Twitter has obviously developed a fast and very powerful search capability. One which rivals like Google, Yahoo and MSN are all likely to be bidding on in the very near future.