March 26, 2009
Twitter may eventually kill Google search…
With time, Twitter or a similar service will kill Google search and every other search engine that we’ve known. We are about to experience the dawn of a new search system that will surpass services like Google search and the others.
The day when search will be powered by Humans and not algorithms is near.
As tens of millions of people go online and share information about their lives and environments, a natural, human-powered, and exceptionally live, metadata index is developing across social networks. It’s powered by Humans and is mostly relevant and ‘alive’.
Billions of pages indexed on Google and other search engines find it hard to compete with something as simple yet highly powerful and accurate like Twitter search.
It’s already happening… a simple search for ‘dubai restaurant’ on Google returns some of the lousiest web pages:
http://www.google.com/search?q=dubai+restaurant
Then try the same search on Twitter Search and you get something quite different:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=dubai+restaurant
With millions of people across the globe talking about their lives and sharing their experiences, some of the highest end Google algorithms stand little chance to deliver human experiences like a social network would. Humans serving accurate information to fellow humans.
This may be a time for dreaming up an ideal marriage. Google should buy Twitter and bring together it’s powerful search service and the human experience.
The following screen shots make a point:
Poor results on both Google and Twitter:
I was amazed to see some results on Twitter beat Google fair and square, yet some were ranked poorly due to the negative human factor of adding garbage to a service like Twitter.
