There’s a lot of talk today, about Twitter being a potential ‘Google Search Killer.’ The theory is that by asking your Twitter followers the kind of things you might search for on Google, you are likely to get more reliable answers. After all, you either know these people or (at least) trust them more than you trust Google’s algorithm; which is increasingly at the mercy of some smart SEO experts.
This makes sense to me and I have often asked people on Twitter for the kind of stuff I previously used Google for. However, I see this facility more as a potential mahalo killer than a Google killer!
Of course, to get more obscure answers, you either need hundreds of thousands of followers OR you need to use Twitter’s search facility. This is where I think the chances of Twitter killing off Google drop massively!
Why Twitter search won’t kill Google
People can easily and quickly manipulate Twitter search results. There are already networking professionals / salespeople among the most highly followed people on Twitter. With them asking their followers to ReTweet recommendations and links, they could easily and quickly OWN search results for a client or sponsor. Yes, I know SEO guys are also very skilled at generating traffic from Google, but Twitter can be gamed in minutes / hours – not days / weeks / months.
Just realised, these guys would become Twitter Optimization Experts…Yes – that makes them TOE’s :)
Twitter’s future growth is hard to predict
Google has hundreds of millions of users. Twitter currently has (depending on who you listen to) anywhere between 2 million and 6 million users. Once Twitter finally introduces a business model, if it involves heavy advertising, paying for the service or anything else likely to put people off, the famous ‘hockey-stick growth’ that Twitter has enjoyed thus far, will slow down really fast.
Until we see what happens when they start making money from Twitter, no one really knows how big it will get.
Twitter wins on trust
When I wanted feedback regarding netbooks last week, I went straight to Twitter and asked my followers. Their recommendations were far, far more valuable to me than anything on Google. I think Twitter WILL dent Google because of the human powered search and the added trust element.
However, until we finally see a Twitter business model and get an idea of how big Twitter will really become, it’s hard to say how big a dent Twitter will make in Google. There’s an alternative opinion on this, over at Lew Moormon’s blog, which I really liked and Robert Scoble has something interesting to say about it too!
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You have some great points, and I have to agree that I find myself asking my Twitter friends questions that, at one time, I’d just Google. But, there is one flaw (as I see it) to the idea that Twitter could ever knock Google off of it’s high-horse, and that’s the older (non-computer) generation. Now, don’t get me wrong, some older people are quite tech savvy, but there are others that aren’t as proficient on computers. Case in point would be my mother and father, they check their emails and do occasional Google searches, but I can’t ever see them signing up for a Twitter account…it’s not that they can’t, it’s that they won’t. They have a general mistrust of any online applications that require their personal information, and I think that many others of the older generation are the same way. I think that would be a major hurdle in Twitter’s world domination. :-)
BTW, TOE’s…love it! :D
You covered both sides of the argument here. That’s OK. I tend to agree with your second point. Twitter is a decent input/output or questions-in / answers-out model, but it’s not a search engine. At least not in the classic sense of a search engine. A search engine needs much more power than the ability to identify a few keywords and click enter. Twitter does a good job with this, but so does any reliable database.
Could Twitter become the next great search engine? I don’t see it happening. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not down on Twitter. I just don’t happen to think search is what twitter is or should be best at. Perhaps Twitter should partner with some of the best search engines out there to create a best of breed experience. I don’t work for Twitter (but I’d certainly like to chat with them) so I don’t have any insight into what they want to be in their next incarnation. However, I hope becoming a search engine isn’t one of them.
Well I think that Twitter is more of a place for an Opinion or some sort of specialized knowledge whereas Google is good for looking up facts and information. You can’t really compare the two because some people may not have a large number of followers thus, rendering Twitter fairly useless. I think it may be better to compare Facebook vs Twitter to find information from your friends vs your followers.
Thianks,
Vic