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Comment by ryanv | Hacker News Reader

And Twitter gives you better results than asking The Google? I don't see how unless you have 2 million followers.

Yes, absolutely. Googling for "luggage reviews" or "which luggage is best" yields only trash (try it, you'll see).

On the other hand, tweeting gave me the following links:

http://onebag.com/ http://geekeasy.com/travel/articles/Luggage_2.shtml http://garry.posterous.com/muji-kicks-ass http://wherethehellismatt.com/faq.shtml

And a variety of other tidbits of info, including some tweets from someone who runs a blog dedicated to location-independent life ( http://locationindependent.com/blog/ ):

http://skitch.com/swombat/bm4y1/twitter-swombat

That represents immediate, obvious value to me.

That's not a bad point, but I wonder how stable the situation is? Will people start flooding twitter and trying to game it just like the Google results? Will they be able to?

I'm not convinced. Those links don't seem all that useful, to me at least.

On the other hand googling for "packing for long term travel" (minus the quotes) gave me:

http://www.vagabondish.com/practical-guide-long-term-travel-... http://eurosatemydollars.com/trip-planning/packing-and-gear/ http://travelindependent.info/whattopack.htm

Those links seem more comprehensive to me.

> And Twitter gives you better results than asking The Google?

Possibly. He got several direct, trusted answers from people risking social capital to help him out. There are lots of cases where personal recommendations are more valuable than indirect, impersonal discussions or reviews.

Yes but that's one example. I suppose the opposite could easily be true for other examples. My question is how is twitter better then google in the general case?

It's not. I never suggested that it is, either. Google is great for some kinds of searches. Twitter is great for some other kinds of searches.

I am one of those people who just don't get twitter. I have some friends on it, it seems to me all they use it for is pointless chit-chat. I am slightly intrigued by the potential for real-time search. Like the picture of the plane in the Hudson which appeared on twitter. But how do you rank search results? What about people like me, whose work requires deep focus, how would I with minimal twittering ever generate enough followers to get something out of a twitter search?

People can search based on keywords as well. I managed to get a couple of cool followers based on that. Helped one guy get his Wii WiFi hooked up. Just search on #lost this evening (4/15)

With search, your overall reach is far more than your direct followers, and it's "real time" as well.

Bots and shameless marketers (I'm looking at you, @guykawasaki) are easily blocked or avoided altogether. It's like a community spam filter.

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