Twitter Ain't Search
marksonland.com
marksonland.com
Twitter is instant. Google has to wait for someone to publish an article on the news and then Google needs to index that article.
Plus with Google, the article's headline doesn't give you the whole story. It's a tease. You have to click over to read the story. On search.Twitter.com, you get the whole thing at once.
If you think about it twitter would be good for traffic or something like that, but only if a radio station or some larger element was relaying the message.
The same goes for a natural disaster, I'm not going to go look and see about a tornado or something along those lines on twitter, but a news company could relay it to me and this is about the biggest use I see of twitter search.
In all honesty if I was searching for a subject it would be because I am aware of it and want to learn more, be it a disaster, story, or subject; twitter to me is exactly what it claims to be a way to update your status quickly and as much as you want.
For my recent experience (a comment on this page): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=504849
It's definitely cool to see people's take on ultra-current events, and Twitter search can provide the Who, What, Where, When, and Why, but does not dig very deep into any of them. And because of the vast amounts of noise, it also requires you to know beforehand what you're looking for.
What Twitter search is amazing at is eyewitness accounts in realtime for things you're actively seeking... but to me eyewitness accounts are only one aspect of the story, and usually I'm not seeking anything in particular. News has its place, and Twitter has its place, I don't see them intersecting over any other aspect than eyewitness accounts.
However this has got to be a tiny fraction of total searches and total utility derived from search.
Also, how often is there breaking news in your neighborhood that's worth following at that level? Even if it's pretty close, but not literally in your neighborhood, it seems you'd be just as good with cnn.com or something.
And since it's backed by actual scientific instruments, you can tell immediately if it was a magnitude 3 in Berkeley, or a magnitude 6 in Parkfield, which is better than some tweet of "I just felt an earthquake".
However, there is a totally different kind of value to Twitter posts: instead of data, I'm getting firsthand accounts of who felt it, where, what they were doing at the time, and what effect it had on their life. Yes, this information is (obviously) anecdotal, but its also interesting, informative and immediate.
Twitter provides "real-time search," but that is just a small, almost miniscule subset of Google's capabilities. You can in some cases get real-time data from social aggregators and Facebook; I think those are the real competitors to Twitter.
Twitter is not even in the same league as Google. They don't cover the same areas, they don't have the same business models, they don't have comparable numbers of users, they don't offer the same services. There is absolutely no competition here.
http://www.google.com/search?q=earthquake+san+francisco
the most recent earthquake it tells me about is 3 hours ago (as of this writing).
The time, place and links to maps are all right there at the top of the serp where I expect.
If I do the same query on twitter:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=earthquake+san+francisco
The most recent result is 19 hours old and then I have to start clicking tinyurls in people's tweets to find more info.
The last one anybody felt was on Feb 21st at 11:01 AM, and the first (non-automated) tweet was at 11:21 AM (http://twitter.com/indiaknight/statuses/1234962301). This example is similarly bad, since it didn't really affect anyone in a big way. However, for instant reactions to notable events, Twitter can't be beat. If today's earthquake had been "the big one," you can bet twitter would have been flooded with information, missing people reports, locations for aid, firsthand accounts and so on.
I also got stuck in crazy traffic on the 405 recently. I searched twitter and learned which side streets to take. Google's map program doesn't seem to cover side streets.
It doesn't replace Google for me, but it does replace it for certain searches.
Twitter search is useful as an opinion poll or for updates on breaking news, but only so much depth and value can fit into 140 characters. More than anything, I think Twitter thrives off vanity and narcissism. It's millions of people saying "look at me" and it's even easier to main and establish popularity than a blog.
Traditional news sources, blogs, TSN.ca, ESPN, Globe & Mail, etc all were slow on updates and commentary about prospective trades and evaluations of minor-league talent. I used search.twitter.com and searched for "#nhltrade" and "nhl" and had a constant stream of news and information. And by subscribing to the very best sources of news I could find there, I was notified of trades via SMS.*
Sure, it isn't "search" the way most people think about it, but its the best search for a specific use case.
* A side note: this allowed me to stay up to date while being slightly more productive at work. I wasn't constantly refreshing pages or listening to talk radio.
If someone can't fit their whole message in 140 characters, they use a link to point you elsewhere (e.g., their blog).
The worst case is that you have to click one link for each search results to see all of the content, which is the same as with google results.
The other way round is plausible, Google comes out with a Twitter killer. That is a real-time search product. But, why bother... Besides Twitter is more than just real-time search and Google is much more than just search.
Of course, the flip side of this is Twitter tweets won't be monetized as efficiently as Google keyword-based ads.