Good article, Josh.

You do tend to see a lot of “lazyweb” searches on Twitter, and I’ve certainly been guilty myself. I think it’s got something to do with the source of the info as well.

On Google, I know I’ll be able to find what I’m looking for, but it’ll take me a few minutes perhaps to go through a few search results, and find the one that seems like it has the best info.

On Twitter, I can throw out a question, and I already know the sources that provide answers. I already know if I should trust them or not (and generally, I do, or I likely wouldn’t be following them).

I think the combination of ‘real-time’ along with that feeling of ‘I trust the source of this info’ makes a compelling case for asking something on Twitter that you could probably answer even quicker using Google.

Best sci-fi short story I read this week

But no tech company is everlasting. Who would have believed that Microsoft would loose so much power that we don’t even bother to talk about how they will die anymore?

Google has many ways to loose — and just one to win?

@Jeff, great point about trusted sources…we almost never know who is on the other end of a Google search result, but we often know who is on the end of a Twitter search.

I also think the questions are different in some ways…like you can’t really ask Google for advice, but Twitter you can.

google vs. social media is the difference between reference, and referral.

google is a reference, and to find accurate info relies on you being able to boil down what you’re looking for to a very small amount of words that hold lots of meaning.

there is no other context – it’s like looking something up in the dictionary. unless you can already succinctly describe what you’re looking for in very few distinctive terms, you won’t find what you need.

social media adds incredibly value context to your search – from your ability to elaborate more (within reason) to being able to disambiguate terms.

even your relationships themselves add infinitely valuable context – your contacts know what you do for a living, the techniques or technologies you use, and might already have experience solving the same problems.

Like Jeff, I go to Twitter when I want answers from trusted contacts. For example, when I ask “What wireless router do you use at home?” I do so because I want to know what my friends are using. On the other hand, I wouldn’t go to Twitter to ask a question that dealt with a matter of fact, such as “How many ports does XYZ router have?” or “What’s the cheapest place to find XYZ router?” Those are questions that can more easily and accurately be answered by Googling for the specific product information. That being said, once I had decided on a router to buy, I might ask on Twitter, “Anyone have a coupon code for XYZ retail outlet?”

Not that everything on Google is factual, but you can be fairly certain that if you find a manufacturer’s webpage on Google, they’ll have correct information about their own products. And sure, people on Twitter might be willing to go and do the dirty work of digging up facts for you, but I don’t see any need to task my already-busy peers with mundane research tasks.

So to sum up, for me:
Twitter for matters of personal opinion
Google for matters of fact

Had one other thought. Occasionally I will make a judgment to ask a factual question on Twitter based on these criteria:

If I predict that finding the answer on Google will be frustrating and time consuming, and I believe that my followers are knowledgeable enough on the subject to respond off the top of their heads, then I may make the decision to ask. But I have to be very confident that the Twitter answer will come much more quickly than the Google answer.

This rarely happens.

I like the way you are using “attention” in your post, and I think it’s worth noting that this isn’t the big-A “Attention” that some folks used to be so excited about with blogs and RSS and ranking and advertising. This is much more simple:

People have Twitter and/or Facebook already open, in front of them, when they need to get info or direction.

So, another way to say it is: the real problem for Google is that they are less and less people’s default “home page.” That puts Google a couple clicks–which are too many, away from fulfilling people’s impulses (both in terms of fulfilling their searches for information, and in terms of temping their desires with advertising).

Further, echoing the comments from Jeff and Josh above–it’s not just Twitter or Facebook as “information services” that are right in front of us, but it’s our friends and peers and other people who can give us smart and personalized responses to our needs without us having to carefully articulate them.

From our friends, we not only can get specific information in response to specific requests (which is most similar to what we migh get out of a search engine), but we can get direction towards the things we want to find, but aren’t necessarily able to describe in general terms!

By this argument, isn’t _everything_ competing against google?

Yes, but…

Google is putting a lot into their browser, Chrome. If it gets traction, then they’ll have our attention regardless of our “social home page.”

- Andy

I agree that Twitter Search is a threat to Google. Not sure what percentages of searches are real time, but I rely on Twitter Search a few times a week now.

However, Facebook doesn’t pose much of a threat to Adwords.

Advertisers do not go to “where there is the most attention” first. They go to where there is the most valuable attention first. Think of People Magazine versus the Yellow Pages. People magazine gets a lot of attention but the Yellow Pages is still a multi-billion dollar business.

I recommend spending a few hundred thousand dollars on Google Adwords and Facebook ads and compare the results. You will get 100x+ times more value for the same spend on the former.

As a business, getting someone’s attention when they are about to buy is much, much, much better than just getting their attention when they are specifically not looking to buy something.

Attention is nearly worthless. Of course, when you have the volume that Facebook has worthless adds up, but I would rather own a search engine with 1% of Facebook’s volume than Facebook (if money is my objective).

Of course, Facebook has done an amazing job over the last few years. I am quite impressed by how well the leadership has executed. But I don’t seem them as much of a threat to Adwords at this point.

As a reference librarian I can tell you there is a lot of information-seeking research to support this POV. See: Impact of low skill levels on information-seeking behavior by Melissa Gross. People want info from social sources, not good sources and will satisfice as a result. The interesting thing is that the more people who use Google, the more its product becomes a “reference authority” and less like a friend. However, that doesn’t change the fact that twitter is much like the “paying attention to the cool kids” activity in high school. The technology is trivial, the social grounding of the activity is not; and besides, there’s no end to collective, self-reinforcing ignorance; viz religion, fashion, global warming, etc.

The difference: Google works for everyone, the great masses of The Long Tail

Twitter only works for those high-up enough on the Power Law Curve to HAVE a bunch of followers, which is a very tiny (but noisy) section of the population.

“The game is attention”

Spoken like a true web designer, that is, someone who doesn’t understand that in this world the game is not attention, but money, or rather a business model, something that neither Twitter nor Facebook have (yes yes Facebook has a revenue stream, but it is not yet profitable, and there is no plan to make it profitable, in other words, it does not have a business model).

People simply do not learn from history. Think of all the hot internet brands over the last 10 years or so that were claimed to have culture-changing impact when they were in the news. A couple come to mind: Napster, Webvan, Kozmo. These brands were hot if not hotter than Facebook and Twitter. But their problem was that there was no business behind the brand. They eventually failed in spectacular fashion, although Napster is still around as a brand, but a mere shadow of its former self.

But what do I know. Facebook and Twitter could develop business models, and succeed in becoming not just popular but profitable. You never know. But what we do know is that, in their current state, they end up like Webvan or Kozmo and will be gone in 10 years, or like Napster, be pale versions of their former selves.

I hope they come up with something big, develop brilliant business models and prove me wrong. But my money’s on history.

I deeply disagree that attention is relevant. While Google may not be as many people’s home page it is in the browser chrome in many people’s browser and that is increasingly how it is accesses.

Now looking at the discussed tie-up between Twitter and Google it is clear to see Google grasps the idea of ease of reach for people searching is more important than destination attention. Many large services have ‘search within the site or search the web’ with the both services being run on Google search.

Another telling note that attention is the wrong focal point is how I increasingly hear, from non-early adopters that they find searching Google for twitter items is far more useful than Twitter search.

There is a difference in the contexts of the two in an ask & retrieve mode. Which to use is at times depends the immediate environmental context (am I on a social tool w/ velocity and trusted experience).

I can also easily see a blended model of ask and retrieve, with social context on the retrieve, just as Yahoo! did with MyWeb2 at one point and inside the firewall tools like Connectbeam do now.

I tend to agree with your “guess” here, and would add that the continual gaming of Google via SEO, and Google counter-acting this to some extent with semi-arbitrary authority preferences, make the page 1 listings increasingly predictable and often pointless. Google’s authority model also collides with true recency almost by definition.

One unknown in the equation is whether Twitter can withstand the mainstream onslaught stability-wise, and whether recent rumblings about them agreeing to open up the timeline firehose to Google are true. If they did the latter, I’d rate it a colossal mistake unless they are getting a sweetheart deal.

If I were Twitter, I’d make Google buy me if they really wanted Real-Time Web search.

I think Google will always be the winner as a Search Engine, it may not get the most attention, but it will always be the place everyone goes back to to find out factual information and compare, and therefore is a winner in its own right.

Well google will buy out twitter.It has so many options available.

Loss Diets

success with weight loss

One thing that will also suck money away from Google’s adversing revenue is the number of “organic” clicks on the web vs. “paid” clicks is growing tremendously. I think more and more people are turning on to SEO and figuring out how to get better search engine ranking without actually paying for it. This is going to hurt Google monetarily as well.

At the time of writing, Google had not yet announced Google Waves. Having watched the vids and spent some time explaining what it is to a friend yesterday, I now realize just how powerful it is Waves will be the communication tool of choice very soon. We will have essentially moved into their OS-independent meta-OS within a couple of years. It’s already happened for a lot of people with GMail and GDocs, Waves takes it to the next level.

Re: search, I use Twitter in 2 ways. For real-time, breaking news or info then Twitter is my first port of call. Google is hours behind and can’t compete.

If I’m looking for info into a product then I’ll use a mix of Twitter and Google to get reviews and personal comments about the product.

I don’t see Twitter and Facebook being Google-killers but I do see them pinching some of their market share over time.

One benefit that Google has is that there is no set-up time required. Both Facebook and Twitter require you to add and find friends before you can use it. With Google you just fire up the site and do the search. No registration required. That’s a pretty big benefit that Google has over these other guys.