Netizen

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Twitter Should Hand Over Search To Google

For Twitter, Sharing Data With Google Would Be Suicide TechCrunch on Twitter giving Google their firehose feed ..... if Twitter was a publicly traded stock its value would drop by 75% the second that deal was announced

Google, Facebook and Twitter do not exactly inhabit the same space. Google does search, Facebook does social graph, Twitter is about tweets, the atoms of real time social interaction.

Why can't I search my Facebook wall? If you have been active on Facebook for a few

Image via CrunchBase

years, you would have a rather elaborate wall. How do you dig into that wall to find something? The same applies to other parts of my Facebook page. I don't have that many links like some people I know, but I do have hundreds of notes, but primarily the wall. Facebook should be able to do it in-house, but if it can't, I say bring Google along. Let the search people do search. It is not true that only the latest entries on my wall are relevant to me.

The same applies to Twitter. A close friend of mine who just got on Twitter did a search on my name to want to follow me, and he could not find me! That is awful. If you can't find someone whose name noone else shares, and who has more than 17,000 followers, good luck with the rest of the crowd. And if Twitter search is that bad with names, you can only imagine how bad it is with tweets. I have stopped using Twitter search months ago. There was a time when T

Image via CrunchBase

witter was my bookmark. I would tweet an interesting link and search it up weeks later. Now that has not been an option for months now. What happened? Twitter grew? That should be good news.

Twitter is in dire need of a robust search capability that can comb through all tweets, real time as well from the archives. That should not be hard to do because you are only asking to search through what rests on the Twitter servers. You are not having to index billions of webpages like some others. But Twitter search is not delivering right now. Either do it in-house, I say, or bring in the big dogs of search. For the user to be able to search through all tweets

Image via CrunchBase