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I used to think Twitter Search was going to be a serious threat to Google's search business and people began writing about it too. It seemed that way since Twitter took over Summize and turned it into Twitter search (I hear you say, "Are you saying it's not?").

For a period last year, my use of Twitter search overtook my use of Google in searching for relevant topics and discussions. In using Twitter as notes during conferences, meetings, and events, I relied heavily on Twitter search to scrounge for my notes, thoughts and observations. In a way, Twitter Search was becoming much more useful than Google. It's so easy, type one or more search terms, hit return and you're off. Because it searches its own network that's nowhere near the size of Google's scope, it's so much faster. It even lets you know if there are new results.

So yes, it's easy to see why it may be a threat to Google. However it's also easy to see why it's not.

Reason one: Unlike Google, Twitter does not prioritize search results so it's easy to find lots of noise among the signal. Plenty of search results are duplications and because of its nature, the results are real time, so there's more noise to deal with with every refresh. If you look up a popular topic, you'll land on page one of the results, and if you wait long enough before going to page two, you may find yourself looking at the same results because newer results have taken over page one. Even worse, you wait longer, and you get newer results on page two or three than the page one result you had originally.

Reason two: Twitter search is not about relevance, it's about currency and immediacy. You will get the latest mention of what you are searching for but it may not be useful to you. You can however refine your search by going to Twitter Search's actual website and go to the Advanced Search rather than use the built in system in your home page (that is if Twitter hadn't forgot to include you in their latest overhaul), but first of all, not a lot of people know this. Secondly, it's linked all the way down on your home page it's as good as invisible.

Here's a page to help you refine your search without going to Twitter's Advanced Search site. It's a list of search operators you can use from your search field but don't get me started on using the built in search in your home page, they need to get that fixed.

Reason three: Twitter Search does not search for anything before January 1 of each year. Twitter at the moment prevents you from looking up anything that was mentioned on Twitter before the start of the year. On the option to filter results by time, it lets you pick years 2008 and 2009 but you will not get a result for 2008. Go ahead, try it. Search for something that was said on December 2008 or earlier. At best, you'll get zero results. That or Twitter will tell you, "The page you were looking for doesn't exist". It doesn't even recognize years 2006 and 2007!

For the moment, this limitation will hinder Twitter Search's competitive drive to rival Google but people do use the two services in different ways and for different purposes. Until Twitter is able to open up its entire database since day one for search results, it will never be a rival to Google. What it will be though, is a complement. People understand that Twitter is about what is going on now, not about what happened last year and they will search accordingly. Twitter search is for current results, for everything else, just Google it.


By the way, this marks my 24 thousandth update on Twitter.

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