Twitter the Fastest Growing NON-Search Engine
Today the majority of Tweets received were about Twitter becoming the Fastest Growing Search Engine. This piqued our interest so we took a look at the related post and did some “testing” for realistic searching. According to Socialnomics “Twitter Founder Biz Stone at Aspen Ideas Festival announced that Twitter now has over 800 million search queries per day … This roughly equates to 24 billion searches per month which is more than Bing (4.1) and Yahoo (9.4) combined.”
“Adding a search box to your website DOES NOT a search engine make.” - Andrew Mull, Master Internet Developer stated in discussion. You can see that Twitter has a tremendous amount of searches but what you really need to look at is what is being searched. Of course the founder, Biz Stone, would say that they (Twitter) are the next major search engine, it’s free publicity and people really eat it up. So can you blame them for making such a claim? Not really but unfortunately now people are under the impression that Twitter is some kind of search engine. Stone also goes on to say about Twitter, that it is “not a social network,” though many people view it as one. “That’s been a myth since the beginning,” he explained. “We’re much more like an information network or a source of news.” *source
Here is where we disagree. Twitter is a social tool, not a search engine. Any developer who has tried to create a well-oiled search engine knows that this is no easy task. When you look at all the intricacies of code and how search engines operate and then look at Twitter… it’s like comparing a single book to an entire library. The library being Google, it’s algorithms and code base.
There is no doubt that Twitter’s numbers are accurate. We are sure that Twitter gets a great amount of searches but we would surmise that most are looking for individual friends or celebrities …or trying to find specific Tweeters that are in the same industry. These users are NOT using Twitter for search in the traditional sense.
To test our hypothesis we went to Twitter and to Google and typed “Capital of Denmark” in their respective search boxes. All we really wanted to know was how fast and easily we could find “Copenhagen”. Surprise, surprise, Google performed better giving us the necessary information in the first link followed by MORE detailed information in other links. Twitter also gives us the information we’re looking for but further down in the “search results” and among other random postings that may mention any of the search terms. Twitter’s short comings are well known so there is no reason to reiterate the obvious. However, it must be known that Twitter lacks the structure and organization to function as a search engine or to realistically compete with Google and Yahoo! Twitter IS a social network simply for the fact that you use it to be social and NOT to search. When Twitter can search outside of itself (for example) instead of just referencing their own stored content, THEN we’ll talk “Search Engine”. Sorry, Biz, but we think you spoke too soon.
