Sydney, Australia-based web developer Michael Air recounts how his “light bulb” moment about real time search came as he was looking for a new hosting company. Instead of looking on Google, he consulted Twitter about a specific brand. “Ten pages in and 99 percent of comments were saying how bad that hosting company was,” he told Murdok.
Twitter, then, becomes a kind of collective representation of the consumer mind and the current consumer mood.
“You’re able to tap into a real time pulse of customer satisfaction. It’s incredibly powerful. The fact that you’re tapping into this real time gives you a very good feel for a company right now. Have they been pleasing their customers this week? Last week? An hour ago? Blogs were going in this direction but you just can’t tap into a live pulse the way you can with real time Twitter.”
That type of consumer information power seems destined for abuse. Despite Twitter’s aggressive spam fighting, blackhatters have targeted the site specifically for parasite hosting because of the trust and relevance Google gives Twitter. Now that the site itself is becoming a real time kind of billboard/consumer review, you can bet that attempts at fraud and manipulative tactics are going to skyrocket.
Air concedes it’s already begun, and companies like Scout Labs, Buzz Numbers, and Collective Intellect are popping up just to track the tweeted buzz. But Air also thinks Twitter is a different animal from traditional search engines, a new incarnation that will be propelled both by the sheer number of users drowning out the abusers (an optimistic view, no doubt), but also because real time search is not in the same category as static search.
“I don’t think Twitter needs to be in Google,” he says. “When I’m searching for a topic, I’m looking information, not 140 characters, which is a very important distinction.” Air suggests Google should weight Twitter lower than it would an information website, which would also help control for parasite hosting. “Treat Twitter as less authoritative and there is less attraction for spammers.”
Along that train of thought is that Twitter is a subsequent search engine, not a replacement search engine. Google and Twitter can exist simultaneously for different reasons—but don’t think Google isn’t seriously considering how to crack this real time search nut. We may see Microsoft-esque fits about it in the near future.
