This morning there was yet more publicity on the popular short text service “Twitter” if you don’t yet know what Twitter is, where have you been this past year?! This service seems to be taking the world by storm and has plenty more potential up its sleeve; however the reviews in the magazine “Shortlist” (a free London publication given out at tube stations) seemed to be less than optimistic with Twitter and its potential for success focusing more on its gimmicky side.

The reviews in Shortlist were written by Tech columnist at the Guardian, Paul Carr and Brent Hoberman founder of lastminute.com. Guardian doesn’t have a twitter account, which is strange to me as most of the main newspapers do? And lastminute.com is more like “lastdecade.com”, that said they had some interesting reports on the twitter business model and came to the conclusion where will it go now? And how will Twitter make money?

My current feeling is that with the idea of integrating Twitter into some form of search platform will establish the future within internet search. Real time search supported by a form of solid indexed search will be the next steps in my opinion.

Twitter is a search engine (the test).

I integrated the current twitter search results within my Google browser though a Greasemonkey script in Firefox. (I’ll explain how in a later video blog). The link and post on how to do this is available at mt-hacks.com

The results of this test have been incredible. It reminds me of the 1st time I used Google many moons ago before the trillions of spammy pages were indexed and when AskJeeves.com ruled UK search.

Over the three days I’ve been using the add on, each and every search I have ran so far on a specific niche has returned the best results in Twitter not Google. This in my opinion beats any of the “static” Google results pages in terms of both content and relevance.

My Twitter Search example

I realised how powerful this actually is when I wanted to step up my twittering. My Facebook account was linked to my twitter account, so each time I updated my status on Twitter, all of my Facebook friends were getting annoyed notified though a Facebook update.

Being Coolest Geek on the Net I really wanted to tweet about topics and issues that I knew would drive some of my “normal” Facebook friends crazy so I wanted some way of filtering what tweets update my Facebook updates.

I ran a long tail search in Google in the hope something might come up. This is my normal course of action when running a “niche” search. I then see what results are returned and retarget my search relative to the results.

My search was

“Separate my Facebook and twitter status update but keep them linked”

As you can see, long tail, the Google results were vague and uninteresting, not specific to what I wanted but sure enough the Twitter results were a totally different story!

Twitter showed me results on was what other people were looking for at that moment in time and after just one search I found the application “Selective Twitter Status” from the top twitter result.

This is not to say I’d not have found this program elsewhere with a bit of in depth searching but the point it, I didn’t need to! Twitter returned the results I wanted over anything Google had to offer! Twitter was my search engine!

The Twitter searching went on throughout the week and each time I’ve found more interesting and relevant results in Twitter search.

Twitter Search Engine Outcome

This is not to write off Google! Even though Eric Schmidt referred Twitter to a “poor mans email system” but I think everyone is overlooking (or playing down) the potential.

This really does highlight the forward path for search and I have to disagree with the writers of the Shortlist column. To think linearly about what this technology has to offer not the way forward it’s not simply that people will have to receive ads though Twitter. This is a very old advertising thought process.

Why not allow “the people” to build the content of the search engine and then monetize the search engine results pages just like Google do? Twitter Real Time Search Engine – This in my opinion for the future of Twitter.

Follow me on Twitter @Swimace

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