Can Twitter Be a Better Search Than Google?

April 27th, 2009 · 11 Comments

I’ve been using Twitter more these days. I think that Twitter is scaring the shit out of Google right now. I signed up with Twitter back probably a year or so ago when gurus the web over were saying to use it to spam your links. You know, as another way of getting backlinks to your sites. I signed up, spammed a couple of links and quickly got bored with it. I’m not bored with it anymore. I have been finding Twitter to be an increasingly effective means of searching for information I’m interested in. And I think that potential is what is keeping Google up at night. The hell am I talking about you ask?

Everybody uses Google. You want to find information on chocolate covered pencils then you simply roll over to big G and type in your phrase. Up pops about 1,284,291 pages of garbage. You hope to get lucky with the first page of listings and if not you surf through the dregs of ever decreasing quality of listings. These are results that has been indexed for days, weeks or months. Stale. And of course you have to wade through the parked domains that are utter shite and the listings from the link spammers.

Ah, but do a search in Twitter. People only have 140 characters to write in. If they want to know about those chocolate covered pencils they are going to get to the point and say what they mean. Targeted keywords. And in some “tweets” people throw out a link to a favorite site. And the best part? Use TweetDeck and leave the search on. Instead of getting stale Google listings you can get up to the second tweets of that topic. All day.

I know it’s not perfect. No, it’s not likely to replace Google. But if you want to know about a specific topic, this sort of, live search, is kind of interesting. People are good about disseminating information. We love to yap. If something cool or interesting pops up it’ll go viral on Twitter.

I’ve sort of dismissed Twitter for a long time. But now it’s the thing. And the “liveness” is very compelling. People are using it and it’s becoming very useful for more than telling the world you are eating a grape gummy bear on the swingset.

I don’t know if Twitter will be all that effective for that long tail keyword crap niche site you built. We’ll still have to play G’s game to get decent listings. But think about this: we all know that unless you have $100,000 or 5 years of time, you’ll never rank for weight loss. But if I do a Tweet and use that keyword, if someone searches for weight loss in Twitter my post will come up. Is it a stretch to think that people will search Twitter for weight loss? I dunno. The shit I searched for on Twitter was just as stupid but I came across some damn good resources. I could write a sentence on weight loss every hour and have a link to a money site.

I know it may sound like I’ve just discovered this. I haven’t. But what I’ve discovered is that it is now useful. And it is going to get more useful. Or spammy. Probably more spammy. But the potential for a different search and getting people to come to your site is compelling I think.

I’m simply looking for a better way to play this game than flog Google. I am sick of getting backlinks. It’s an exhausting exercise. You’ll probably never have more visitors from Twitter than Google for your crap niche site. But I think as people start using Twitter more and more they will see that using it to search for stuff is potentially more rewarding than Google listings. At least I hope so. Because Twitter as it is now levels the field for everyone.

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11 responses so far ↓

Walt // Apr 27, 2009 at 10:38 am

Yes, Twitter Search is incredible. There’s a great Greasemonkey script for Firefox called “Twitter Search Results on Google” Anytime you search Google it will also return the top 5 search results for the same term using Twitter Search. In addition, it provides a link to the full Twitter search results (so you don’t have to re-type it). I’ve found it to be really useful.
Splork // Apr 27, 2009 at 1:28 pm

Cool Walt. Thanks.
Courtney // Apr 27, 2009 at 2:16 pm

I’ve never thought of using Twitter for searches! It sounds like a great idea. I go in and out of using it to chat with people (I’m in a “It’s so unproductive and timewasting” mood), but I may have to test this out. Especially with that cool tool Walt listed!

I found your site when I was searching for a review on a particular product. I’m definitely going to be subscribing to your feed. I love your no-B.S. style.
Splork // Apr 27, 2009 at 3:41 pm

Thanks for reading Courtney.

It’s hit or miss whether you find something worthwhile, but I like that it is basically live search. Walt’s tool sounds cool, but I use TweetDeck and just set the search and let it go all day. Maybe you find something. I think the potential of that will concern Google at some point.
Denise // Apr 27, 2009 at 8:45 pm

I could not agree with you more about using Twitter for search through TweetDeck. Nice tool!

Bye the way I cannot find you on Twitter.
Splork // Apr 28, 2009 at 10:40 am

I don’t use “splork” on Twitter. I think I have an account but I can’t ever remember using it to yap.
Bush Mackel // Apr 28, 2009 at 2:05 pm

Like Courtney, I have never thought to use Twitter for searches. Maybe in the future Twitter will be something I use to get more backlinks and traffic to my site but for right now I guess I’m content just following people with like minded interests. I’m especially happy that my “friends” don’t know/use Twitter yet and are still yappin’ it up on Facebook. (#):)
Anna Maria // Apr 29, 2009 at 6:46 pm

A Twitter search can become a Google alert-to-RSS feed to autoblog. Twitter also provides additional backlinks: set up FriendFeed with your blog and it automatically tweets the post.
haily // May 22, 2009 at 4:50 pm

I don’t think twitter can search better than google !
Splork // May 22, 2009 at 6:51 pm

Nope. Not yet. But live search is the trend. Even Google admits the boat has so far left them in that regard.

From Techcrunch:

“Larry Page and Eric Schmidt from Google did a double header interview from the Google Zeitgeist conference just outside of London today. But the real question on our lips was what is Google going to do about the astounding buzz around realtime search and Twitter?

During a press conference I asked the question of of of Google’s executives, and the answer came back that “the kind of innovation like what Twitter is doing and what we’re doing is increasing search speed, relevance , freshness and comprehensiveness. Other companies will come up with solutions of course.”

Not a great answer.

Luckily, Loic Le Meur is also here and put Larry on the spot on stage, and captured:

“I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about realtime.”

See, Larry actually came up with the idea first. “
Jared // May 29, 2009 at 10:53 am

I am not on Twitter yet but there is a lot of people that I know that use it for back links etc. It’s funny, I read this post and its so true, you get up to the minute information unlike Google. Ezinearticles from 2006 still take over the number one spot in most long-tail searches