You may have been seeing a lot of Google vs. Twitter articles on the internet. There are these predictions that Twitter may overpower Google in the near future. And what better way for Twitter to up the game than by incorporating trends and search.
However, this seems to be just on testing stage. It was just recently when the Twitter Blog has announced that they will be incorporating search and trends. Twitter search is not really integrated in the website before. I guess they will be transferring the search feature from the subdomain search.twitter.com to the main website. But users have been seeing this trends tab appearing on the top bar. It seems that they are going to implement it.
But what does this have to say in the SEO world? Well, Twitter have always been associated with search. There is always the Google vs. Twitter wars. Some have been claiming that Twitter is slowly overpowering Google.
One instance is when Dave Winer did an experiment in his post entitled “Twitter *kills* Google in Real Time Search“. He tracks the news and he found out how quick Twitter updates compared to Twitter. The upper hand of Twitter, according to him, is the power of real time conversations. For example, in news, it will reach the Twitter community as soon as people talk about it. With Google, on the other hand, they need to wait for someone to write about it. Of course talking about a particular issue with your followers come first before crafting an article. And with the huge brands now having Twitter accounts, one can now count on the tweets for the latest news. As Patricia Skinner said in her article “The Changing Face of Search: Is Google Losing It’s Grip?”, Google may not be the best on the internet anymore. People do not need to depend on it anymore to get updates. They can go to social media websites and follow the experts and get the right information directly.
I think that this evolution comes from the increase use of the internet. People search but they also like to hang out at particular websites like forums. With the emergence of social media, people now have a place to talk about the things that are happening to them. They can also connect with brands and get the news directly. They get the links to the stories that matter most.
However, the only downside I find in this theory is the failure of consideration of countries who do not have constant internet access. Social media only work if you’re always online. This is the problem of Twitter. Here is how Dave Winer described it:
the Twitter result is scattered and disorganized. If you weren’t watching the event unfold in realtime you would not be able to piece together the story
With this, it is hard for non-constant internet users to use social media to track stories. They are not even as knowledgeable to use it because they hardly use the internet. And with that they can only depend on good old Google search.
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