search Archive

Twitter – The Discovery Engine?

By
Tom
Published: October 12, 2009Posted in: TwitterTags: , , , ,

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.Twitter vs Google

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.

Chinwag – Long Live Search. Thoughts.

By
Tom
Published: October 4, 2009Posted in: NewsTags: , , , ,

I was really lucky to be able to gain access to the Chinwag ‘Search is Dead. Long live search.’ event held in Soho, London last week.chinwag

The event was based around the statement ‘search is dead’ – and all the connotations that this statement presented. I believe that the main topic that the discussion brought up was the fact that search is certainly not dead but it is changing, and the way people search is changing too.

With the introduction of real time conversational platforms such as Twitter, we are able to find out what’s going on right now. It’s hard to believe that one single online entity such as Twitter can make such a huge difference to the way we engage in digital conversation but it has. Twitter is massive.

Google have started to index Twitters real time updates once every 6 minutes down from once every 6 days, showing the true growth of microblogging and how Google themselves are starting to place more weighting and importance on their existence. With the pending implementation of Google Caffeine on the horizon, search is about to get a whole lot different; with more importance being placed on links which have the most activity, rather than links just existing is going to change the way companys engage in SEO.

Although i believe that link building will still have an effect on the search rankings, Caffeine will be placing more importance on those links which experience lots of user interaction; therefore making social media marketing an important area for web based companies wishing to gain more presence. The more conversations online using and sharing your links, the higher those links will rank you.

One person pointed something very interesting out though. While it’s easy to compare Twitter with Google in terms of searching for information in the same way you would with a search engine, real time conversational platforms such as Twitter are more suited to be branded ‘discovery engines’ rather than a substitute to a search engine just because it’s live.

Twitter Search

When something newsworthy occurs, people tweet about it because its breaking news. The more people who tweet about it, the higher it climbs on trending topics and therefore bringing it to peoples attention. As we speak, i checked out the trending topics and find ‘Chealsea’ there – i click on it and find that after 45 minutes their game vs Liverpool is still 0 – 0.

This information has been discovered through people talking about it and therefore i’ve discovered this information without searching for it.

The main thing that fired off heated debate was that Twitter will replace Google’s ’outdated’ design with it’s real time search capabilities – making search obsolete. I believe this is simply not the case and many others would agree too. The focus should be on adapting to the way people search and optimising pages for enhanced search indexing  rather than trying to replace search all together.

Ciaran Norris, a panel member commented by bringing up mobile search as an emerging search behaviour. People search for different things on the go using different terms as they would if they were at a desktop – something which has started to be embraced through the use of the iPhone clocking your location for map searches and apps from the app store which offer location based services.

Overall a highly valuable experience, learned a whole lot about search and its future – if i tried to get it all down here i’d be here for hours and the post would run on more than it has now. Was fascinating to listen to what the panel members had to say, and was really quite inspirational too.