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Comment by TweedHeads | Hacker News Reader

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TweedHeads·

Try finding this on twitter:

- who was Joan of Arc

- the first movie of Elijah Wood

- the capital of Somalia

- atomic number of Molybdenum

Twitter search is good for personal interaction.

Google search is good for everything else.

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I would go to wikipedia for all of those.

Luckily, the first or second result of a Google search for each of those links to Wikipedia. I find it's faster to do a Google search and click on the Wikipedia link than it is to go to Wikipedia and hit Search.

Search for:

wiki Joan of Arc

wiki Elijah Wood

wiki Somalia

wiki Molybdenum

The next question is, for the sort of search that you can sell ads against, where will people go. And the answer is still google...

What about the sort of search like 'recommend a good restaurant in SF'? That's the sort of search you'd do on Twitter, where you know you get human replies not machine ones, or possibly a custom site like Yelp (still not Google). It's also the sort of thing you can sell ads against.

better yet, ask that on aardvark (vark.com)

got any invites for vark?

Huh, there hasn't been robots written to do that yet for Twitter? You'd think Twitter would have spam trouble like that, by now.

(I guess that is an open niche for people doing natural language interaction... 1/2 :-)

<cough>

Well, depends quite what you mean, but part of what I'm working on is understanding answers to questions like that. Without actively polling twitter (ie spamming 'Hey guys, what's...').

Search for [good restaurant in SF] on Google and you get a restaurant guide from the San Francisco Chronicle as the top web result. That's a lot faster than asking your twitter followers for it.

btw, just tried both twitter and google with above queries and here is the result:

- twitter = nonsense

- google = right answer in first page

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