There is a problem with the logic here, however. You only need to spend some time at Yahoo Answers (a kind of hybrid) to see it. As twitter continues to grow, Cassandra might have been hit with 100 useless troll messages completely wasting her time. The 10 people who might have helped her could have been unplugged or lost in the noise.

A few years ago people were saying that Wikipedia was going to be a Google killer (it is for a growing segment).

I’m not sure how long you’ve been using the internet but a clear and quantitative process occurs with popular sites:

1. The kids and trolls swarm it.
2. Business and every get-rich-quick schemer overwhelms it with garbage.

The first group wastes your time. The second group won’t even look at you unless you have a handful of cash and then they waste your time.

Twitter needs to deal with these two groups better than everyone else has to this point. If it doesn’t, then Twitter will be much more like the real world than Google’s search and it losses before the fight even begins.

Google’s ability to block out the useless ‘noise’ gives it a distinct advantage. It’s ability to include tweets as part of it’s search is another advantage (facebook dealt with it by closing it’s database to all search engines).

As soon as the kids begin tweeting and business finds a way of exploiting twitter further, they may actually be fighting for their very existence.

There is a lot of discussion about searching previous conversations. This is good, but not where the real power comes in. Judy hits it on the head. It is the social aspect. Google searching twitter archives is irrelevant. It is the crowd that matters.

If you can already use google to find practically anything, then twitter replacing google search will not make sense to you. I am talking about the majority of people that cannot always find what they want with google. The same people that go to forums and post their question before searching the archives and reading 42 pages of posts before they ask their question. For them, they don’t want the chase, they want the answer. The same people that pay a computer repair company rather than look up the beep codes. Not everyone is tech savvy.

For those of you internet marketers out there (@mattwardman), I realize that you are optimizing your blog content for being found. That is great when you can monetize it. When it is just general content with no specific niche, there really is little structure. People in general keep much more in their heads than they ever blog about.

I agree that google will no doubt already have plans to thwart crowd sourcing of search. They had better not leave it much longer though.

The greasemonkey script is interesting. What would be even more interesting is if the query was tweeted at the same time and the real-time results streamed into the web page. Also interesting if it would show the degrees of separation for the people answering the tweet in the case where the original tweet was RT’ed.

Really interesting discussion on this post. I really appreciate the time everyone has taken.

Thanks for your reply.

I imagine a good many people reading this article might not be technically literate enough to be able to fill in all the blanks left by your “not true” replies…

Twitter runs an open API and there already 3rd party search services. Google will add a “Twitter” search just as it did Blog Search, Video Search and all the rest. They may buy Twitter, but they may not need to.

>Search engines know little of context.
Not true.

>They only know what content authors tell them.
Not true.

>Search engines pride themselves on returning as many hits as possible
Not true.

>as quickly as possible.
Yes but that is a technology/algorithm question.

>Users of search engines have to search for terms they think the original content author would have used.
Half true, search engines use alternatives too. But do you expect them to read your mind?

>In the case of stock photography…
See the research on auto image-interpretation going on for the last several years.

>Blog posts have even less structure.
Not true.

>Generally the information consists of free-form posts with little regard for who the end reader is and how they will find that information.
Generally bloggers are *intensely* aware if who the end reader is and how the will find that information. We are specialists in niches.

>Search engines don’t understand, and frankly don’t care, exactly what their user’s need.
Not true.

At this point I gave up. Sorry, John.