20 February 2009 | Author: R. Falconer SEO Consultant
Twitter has started to integrate its real-time search engine with the main part of the site. Until now, it has been held on a subdomain that was not accessible from the primary site. But is this the next generation in search? Will real-time search take off?
Twitter's search engine searches through user "tweets" and provides a list of the ones that contain the keywords you specify. The Trends function shows what people are Tweeting about right now. At a glance you can see what the world considers most important at that moment. It's this immediacy that sets Twitter search apart from Google et al.
Twitter has grown exponentially over the last year and is now at the stage where it has a huge and still growing user base, but it now needs to start thinking about ways to stop haemorrhaging cash and actually make a profit. This has not proven easy for other social media sites. As it stands, Facebook may as well be burning fifty pound notes as a business model.
Google was in this situation once too. Sergey Brin and Larry Page had a huge user base, a solid product but no income. They made a point of not putting banner ads on the site and decided to do that only as a last resort. Eventually they stumbled on and improved GoTo.com's model of paid advertising, now known as Adwords. It seems to have paid off for them.
Twitter, like Google before it, is looking past banner advertising revenue and could now be looking to search as a way to monetise the site. Search alone won't bring in the money needed to prevent the fail whale from falling but having a popular search engine definitely opens the door to selling targeted advertising and makes the company infinitely more valuable in the eyes of the big players on the web.
Twitter's main asset is a huge user base of people addicted to feeding in information on exceptionally current issues. Harnessing this information in a way that provides searchers with interesting and engaging results could make Twitter extremely valuable in future.
The big question is whether this real-time search, searching 140 character inputs from around the world, is any threat to the current status quo. Will it prove such a threat that Google, Yahoo! and MSN will need to shake up their offerings? In short the answer is no (although I wouldn't mind seeing some updates from MSN anyway) but it does offer something different to these search engines. Twitter search allows users to track real-time events as they unfold in a way that none of the other search engines can hope to do.
Twitter has proven recently that news can be relayed faster on its site than anywhere else after eyewitnesses tweeted about the Hudson River-bound US Airways flight last month. If finding news this way becomes common (as seems inevitable) then the best method of searching it will also become popular. We may have found the next generation of search engines - and the best model yet for human generated search - with which Wikia, Google (Searchwiki) and others have been tinkering. Providing us with a new development to run parallel with search as we know it and give us a taste of things to come.
Twitter Search: the best human generated search yet?
Twitter has started to integrate its real-time search engine with the main part of the site. Until now, it has been held on a subdomain that was not accessible from the primary site. But is this the next generation in search? Will real-time search take off?Twitter's search engine searches through user "tweets" and provides a list of the ones that contain the keywords you specify. The Trends function shows what people are Tweeting about right now. At a glance you can see what the world considers most important at that moment. It's this immediacy that sets Twitter search apart from Google et al.
Twitter has grown exponentially over the last year and is now at the stage where it has a huge and still growing user base, but it now needs to start thinking about ways to stop haemorrhaging cash and actually make a profit. This has not proven easy for other social media sites. As it stands, Facebook may as well be burning fifty pound notes as a business model.
Google was in this situation once too. Sergey Brin and Larry Page had a huge user base, a solid product but no income. They made a point of not putting banner ads on the site and decided to do that only as a last resort. Eventually they stumbled on and improved GoTo.com's model of paid advertising, now known as Adwords. It seems to have paid off for them.
Twitter, like Google before it, is looking past banner advertising revenue and could now be looking to search as a way to monetise the site. Search alone won't bring in the money needed to prevent the fail whale from falling but having a popular search engine definitely opens the door to selling targeted advertising and makes the company infinitely more valuable in the eyes of the big players on the web.
Twitter's main asset is a huge user base of people addicted to feeding in information on exceptionally current issues. Harnessing this information in a way that provides searchers with interesting and engaging results could make Twitter extremely valuable in future.
The big question is whether this real-time search, searching 140 character inputs from around the world, is any threat to the current status quo. Will it prove such a threat that Google, Yahoo! and MSN will need to shake up their offerings? In short the answer is no (although I wouldn't mind seeing some updates from MSN anyway) but it does offer something different to these search engines. Twitter search allows users to track real-time events as they unfold in a way that none of the other search engines can hope to do.
Twitter has proven recently that news can be relayed faster on its site than anywhere else after eyewitnesses tweeted about the Hudson River-bound US Airways flight last month. If finding news this way becomes common (as seems inevitable) then the best method of searching it will also become popular. We may have found the next generation of search engines - and the best model yet for human generated search - with which Wikia, Google (Searchwiki) and others have been tinkering. Providing us with a new development to run parallel with search as we know it and give us a taste of things to come.
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