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Is Twitter a Better Search Engine than Google?
Posted on May 7th, 2008 8 commentsI have had a flurry of thoughts since posted my blog “My New Distributed Brain.”
The result of that epiphany is this: that Twitter has the potential to be a better search engine than Google.
“But,” you say, “Twitter is a microblog? How can it beat Google at search?”
Are you on Twitter?
Try this out: the next time you have a question, post it to Twitter instead of doing a search on Google.
Did you get an answer? Was it The Right Answer?
This doesn’t work everytime–at least not yet. But it works often enough that I use this approach to answer a lot of questions on a daily basis.
It works well enough that I notice a lot of other people that I follow are using it to ask questions–and get answers. (Twitter founder Biz Stone, Jason Calacanis and Chris Pirillo come to mind.)
It works often enough that Google and the other search engines would be well advised to take notice.
Querying Twitter does not always work right now but Twitter is growing fast.
With it’s open and flexible APIs, people are finding more and more ways to use the Twitter platform in new and innovative manners.
Twitter is a great platform to tap the collective intelligence and channel it into enhancing–even transcending the search engine as we know it. It’s not AI, it’s all “I” (real human Intelligence).
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft–watch out!
Why Twitter?
Why Twitter?
Could another messaging / microblogging platform beat Twitter at this game?
Possibly–but Twitter has several advantages at this point:
- Large user base. Twitter has 1 million users and it’s growing 800% annually.
- It seems to have a user base that skews towards openness and community. Good, good.
- Following is open by default; following does not require consensus by both parties; one person can choose to follow another in an non-symmetrical relationship; this makes it easy for people to build a list of people they want to hear from, easy for people to build a following.
- The “Track” feature allows you to track words of interest to you: this is critical.
- SMS integration. Can send and receive tweets via SMS. Perfect for mobile search.
Would people really have time to answer all these questions? Don’t worry, as Clay Shirkey points out: We Have the Time! (Part 2)
Scenario: A Major Search Engine Acquires Twitter
Once this meme catches on, I see a very high potential for this scenario to unravel:
- One of the major search engines moves rapidly to acquire Twitter.
- The search engine uses the Twitter API to post some queries as tweets.
- People start to answer the search engine tweets; they do it for many reasons: ego, community, interest in the topic, self promotion–the reasons are many.
- The search engine uses Ajax to put twitter responses on the results page in real time, augmenting their algorithmic search results. (Thanks for pointing this out, Arthur!)
- The search engine becomes the #1 search engine AND the biggest social network on the planet, dwarfing the Google of today.
There is a whole lot more the Search Engine could do to optimize the process; this is an idea in it’s infancy. Options to increase performance include: caching results of previous similar tweets, using the tweets as another source of signals for standard search results, build and integrate a reputation system so that tweeters are ranked by their accrued trust and accurate ratings (this would help to prevent spam from cropping up in tweet results). And more. A lot more.
I have done a search (on Google) and I have not found a similar system proposed. Hmmm.
I did however, get an answer on a similar system when I tweeted about this idea. (See! See what I mean!)
@tewson pointed out that ChaCha is a search engine that can take queries from users via the web, voice and SMS and a real person compiles an SMS response, but this is no where near as powerful as querying the masses.
Sergei, Larry, if you guys are reading this, follow me on Twitter: @jfxberns. We should talk.
2008.06.18 Update:
@celerachan pointed out this blog on SheGeeks by Alana Taylor that, basically, reaches the same conclusion: She Geeks In Tech – Stop Using Search Engines, Start Twittering
Blogs & Blogging, Social Media / Computing / Networking, Startups distributed intelligence, google, reputation systems, twitter6 responses to “Is Twitter a Better Search Engine than Google?”
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Your idea has potential.
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Hi John, you’d be interested to know that Google’s probably had its eyes on Twitter for a while now. After all, they’ve already acquired Jaiku. http://mashable.com/2007/10/09/jaiku-google/
If you’d like to really see how a network like Twitter would look like integrated into a serach engine, see http://www.summize.com.
Google searches the web, and Twitter searches conversations and opinions. I think Google searches can lead you to discover a variety of options to choose from and sometimes new information and relevancy you first weren’t looking for, but Twitter gives you an answer that your immediate friends recommend. More concise, but less choices. They’re different tools for finding answers from different sources, so I wouldn’t say one is better than another – you wouldn’t use a fork to eat soup, even though both forks and spoon’s purposes are for eating.
I admire your brainstorm though. I’m glad I discovered your blog…from Twitter!
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Hi John,
AFAIK, the twitter founder is also a Pyra Lab founder, a company behind Blogger. And I have read from, he doesn’t want to work with Google again.Does that mean he want twitter to be acquired by MS or Yahoo?
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Wow… you’re article is EERILY similar to mine! Of course, you wrote yours first so perhaps it may seem like I took your idea, but it’s not the case! I guess we just experienced the same situation and had the same instinct to share what happened! Such is life
I really like your blog post better than mine though, much more in-depth and with pictures. Unfortunately I could not go back through pages of Twitter archives to find screenshots of my experience. (Hmm.. something for someone to think about. A faster archive search. Quotably and Summize don’t always show all the @replies or in order). -
An interesting idea. I will have to give this a try. Reminds me of how http://www.chacha.com works, only no one gets paid..
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[...] Is Twitter a better search engine than Google? – Interesting idea [...]
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[...] close knit to everyday life, Twitter can also be used to get answers. It can be thought of as a search engine powered by people. Just ask a question, and more often than not you’ll get a reply from one of the other [...]
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mameou May 8th, 2008 at 11:29