Having attended the recent Chinwag Live event in Soho, London – one thing that was raised was that people are looking at real time search in the wrong way. Real time search Is not something that is replacing traditional search, but instead it is something that is raising reason to engage in traditional search.
Let me elaborate.
At the moment, the one place in which you can log in and find out what the most current events occuring across the globe is Twitter. Through providing the top 10 trending topics, you can see exactly what is on everyones lips – currently a feature which is not possible through traditional search engines, except at Bingtweets, who give you the option to see what everyone is tweeting about with regards to your search keywords.
The implications of this are important. People turn to Twitter as a means of discovery, i know i certainly do. When i log into twitter, the first thing i do is check the trending topics for trends which i would find interesting – things that could be potentially breaking news – and it doesnt take long for breaking news to be at the top of the trending topics either.
For people like me, what this does is turns Twitter into a means to find news without a specific idea of what news you want to find. It drives traffic right back to the search engines, as people take the trending topics, and immediately ‘Google’ them to find out what is so important about that keyword.
However, this doesn’t necessarily ring true for everything. For example, as i type this, Mike Tyson and Oprah have become two of the trending topics on Twitter, and now I want to find out why.
I click the trending phrases and i can see in one tweet that Mike Tyson was on the Oprah show and broke down in an emotional interview. Done. I don’t need to take this any further than that if i only cared about that information, however there will be people out there who will want to read a transcript of the interview or watch the video, and will subsequently go and Google ‘Miket tyson Oprah interview’.
Bam – instant traffic to Google.
So what are the implications of this? Well – I think the ability to provide its users up to the second trends of what people are talking about is what makes Twitter a threat to search engines services however, it is not a replacement. The two actually work very well together. Twitter discovers and makes prominent the current trends and gives people reason to go and find it.
Perhaps Google will integrate some form of ‘trending searches’ feature to their homepage, displaying what people are currently searching for the most, live, and up to second. Not sure though. It’d probably consist of Porn and drugs.
