Could Twitter Be a Real Time Search Engine?
For marketers, indeed for businesspeople of all stripes and sizes, the next best thing to having a certified mind reader on staff would be to have, at your fingertips, a tool that could tell you—instantly—what people were thinking about right now about any subject at all under the sun. Not what people were thinking about a few days ago, a month ago, a decade ago, or even five hundred years ago, but what people are thinking about right now. A real time search engine, in other words.
That may sound pretty far-fetched and futuristic, but Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch believes the future is now, and it’s named Twitter. More accurately, it’s Twitter’s search engine.
Twitter’s search functionality comes thanks to Summize, a six-person start-up Twitter acquired in July 2008. Currently, Twitter’s search is fairly crude—enter a keyword, and search merely brings up the most recent tweets containing the keyword. However, the company is currently working to perfect a feature called Track, which allows Twitter users to follow specific keywords.
Why is all this important?
According to Schonfeld, search engines like Google are valuable because they capture people’s intent—what they’re looking for, what they want, what they want to learn about—but they don’t do a good job of capturing what people are doing or what they’re thinking about now. That’s where Twitter search excels—it gives you a pretty good idea about current sentiment and opinion, and it’s also great at breaking news as it happens. And being able to take an accurate temperature reading of public sentiment is a marketer’s bread and butter.
Perhaps. But perhaps Twitter’s value as a real time search engine is as fleeting as the value of real time information itself. After all, what good is real time information if it’s inaccurate? What’s the value—indeed—of opinion at all, when everyone in the world is free to have one? And who’s going to pay for such a thing? Would Microsoft, say, buy a background ad on a Twitter search results page for the “Zune” search term where the tweets were mostly negative?
When all is said and done, Twitter’s value as a search engine might be no better than yesterday’s newspaper. And yesterday’s newspaper, of course, has already been indexed by Google.
By Robert Pothier
