Comments on: Twitter is Not a Search Engine

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:47:02 +0000

Twitter right now is not a search engine, however I heard they will be indexing the sites that are linked from Tweets. This could be a great feature to getting real time results from around the web not just Twitter. I don’t know if this would help them in being considered a search engine, but it certainly brings Twitter closer to that.

By: Is it time for Google to start tweeting? « Thoughtpick Blog

Is it time for Google to start tweeting? « Thoughtpick Blog — Tue, 12 May 2009 10:30:31 +0000

[...] we perceive search in general and its effect on Google in particular? While some people argue that Twitter is not even a search engine, others give reasons of why Twitter’s is the future of web [...]

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:09:52 +0000

I think it’s also important to draw a distinction between the *content* and the *engine*.

Yeah, that’s sort of my point, and in particular why I ended with “let’s hope that they or others build rich search functionality on top of the content it is encouraging its users to produce.”

The web isn’t a search engine. Neither is Twitter’s conversation stream. Search.twitter.com is at best a minimal search engine, and really more of an alerting tool. Which is useful, but not in the way most of us are used to thinking of a search engine.

If you want to call Twitter a search engine, then it seems you have to call any content collection with a search box a search engine. I remain unconvinced by the value of such a general definition.

By: Phil Bradley

Phil Bradley — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 12:16:36 +0000

How much of the information that Google provides is ‘valuable and unique’? We really can’t use that as any kind of indicator as to the role that a resource (ie. search engine) plays. A search engine finds content and makes it available to someone searching for content. Doesn’t really matter that much what the actual information *is*.

The content available on Twitter *does* fulfill information needs as you go back and point out. Though since you say that one of the reasons that it’s not a search engine is because it doesn’t, then you say that it does fulfill needs but still isn’t a search engine seems to be slightly odd.

Google search engine functionality is limited. It doesn’t do proper Boolean, it doesn’t help narrow or broaden, it doesn’t use a huge number of other levels of functionality that other search engines do, but we’d still agree it’s a search engine. Moreover, advanced Twitter search does some types of searches that Google simply can’t.

Furthermore, Google is great for historical information (ie. more than a day old), but isn’t very good for real time content obviously. I agree that there’s a lot that Twitter doesn’t do which Google does, but I can make the same claim regarding Google and other engines. Moreover, you don’t seem to appreciate that we’re talking about different types of data, which as such require different approaches.

I think it’s also important to draw a distinction between the *content* and the *engine*. The Twitter engine isn’t that great. Some of the content is excellent. Which is where another 20 alternative search engines come into play, all of which do search the content, and in some cases better than the native engine.

I remain entirely unconvinced by your arguments.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 04:56:52 +0000

Someone actually asked me at a talk tonight if I thought Twitter was a search engine. It took enormous restraint for me to just say no and then return to my talk, which was about exploratory search and semantic technology.

By: jeremy

jeremy — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:51:37 +0000

Saying Twitter is a search engine is like saying that Digg is a search engine.

More similarites there than I can describe in 140 characters.

By: Steven Hodson

Steven Hodson — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:14:45 +0000

thank you, thank you, thank you .. finally some sensibility on this.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:26:45 +0000

Indeed, I think it's best to think of Twitter as an alerting engine than a search engine. But even there it suffers from the same problems as other alerting engines, like Google Alerts. See my earlier rant about alerting here.

By: Andreas Ringdal

Andreas Ringdal — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:10:10 +0000

It might not qualify as a search engine, but their search provides great value trough its rss feeds

Andreas

By: Jim Gilliam

Jim Gilliam — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:08:02 +0000

It will take quite a while to build it out because it’s a very hard problem, but the potential is there to create an unbelievable search engine due to all the metadata they’ve got on who’s tweeting what.