Every so often a blogger will provide me with an “Uh, duh” moment, what some might call a minor obvious epiphany, something I should have thought of already. Steve Rubel gets the credit for that this time, in a Micropersuasion post about Twitter and Facebook’s impending impact on search.
We already know from some inside sources that Google is nervous about Twitter’s and Facebook’s potential in the search market, nervous in a way Microsoft could never make them. As far as nearly instantaneous crawling, indexing, retrieving, and query-matching of the Web—you know, the whole trillion-URL massive Web—it’s unlikely anybody’s going to come close to Google.
Checking thousands of machines in 0.2 seconds is a mammoth feat, kids.
So is grabbing the trust and admiration of three-quarters of the Web-searching populace. But did you know there’s only about 1.4 million people using Google’s blog search engine? You probably did know Google has missed the boat on this social network thing. (Schmidt and company passed on buying MySpace for half what News Corp. did, thinking they could build their own social network.)
The microblogging boat? Yep. Missed that one, too.
But what’s it to Google? Social networks and microblogging services aren’t search.
Oh but wait. They are. Eventually. Just different kinds of search engines. They’re social search engines. They’re real time search engines capable of retrieving information from select groups of people.
Rubel brings out his nifty charts and graphs and shows that Twitter Search has surpassed Google’s blog search engine, and until a sudden resurgence at Technorati, was en route to take them on too.
That’s significant because it shows a lot of people are bypassing searching the blog wasteland for some anonymous or unknown source sitting pretty among the spammy weeds with exactly the information they want. Blog search is the digital equivalent of dumpster diving.
You may say next, “Give it time. Twitter will join the compost heap with Blogger.” Searching MySpace isn’t really any better. But that may be because MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook all only search across their entire networks. Here, Rubel makes the obvious distinction.
“You can’t limit your search to only what your trusted circle have shared.”
Right! I have to sift through a whole bunch of idiots.
I don’t know how it goes at your house, but this is how the information gathering process happens at mine:
Phone book is in the closet, ignored. Books on the shelf ignored. Newspaper on coffee table, nonexistent now, but in the past would have been ignored. Room of full of people. I ask room full of people if they know the answer to Question A. Nobody knows the answer. Telephone, ignored (don’t like talking on the phone, like automated systems less, and never ever text if I can avoid it). Go to computer, bring up Google, search Web. Maybe search News. Last resort, search Blogosphere. If no answer, I give up. But usually answer found at the Web search stage.
With the ability to search inside of my network on Twitter, before maybe going to the rest of Twitter, or to consult my friends’ archives on Facebook—I really hate throwing out Question A to the silent ether and hoping and waiting for an answer; I’m impatient, but that can work too—that gives me an intermediary option of consulting a small repository of trusted sources, no spam, no digging, just a quick look to see if my buddies know anything, the digital, real time equivalent of asking the room full of people, a question like, hey, who won the game?
And I think that will be a powerful force on the search horizon. Social search may become what blog search was supposed to be in the first place.
