Santosh Jayaram was the manager of search quality operations at Google. Now, he’s the VP of Operations for Twitter. While I don’t think that the quality of Google’s search results is going to degrade with Santosh’s departure, I do think that the value of Twitter’s search function is going to increase exponentially in the coming months.
Everyone knows about Twitter – the increasingly popular micro-blogging platform. Fewer people know, use and understand the search function on Twitter. Google search provides access to information on the web that is highly relevant and usually up to date. However, occasionally a search will yield a result that is, by now, completely outdated. Search for a review of a product or a service and sometimes you’ll find a review in a forum from 2006 – for a product/service that was much different from what you are considering today.
Enter Twitter search -
With Twitter search, you can look for conversations that are happening right NOW. Suppose you are considering hiring a new firm to redesign your website. You might use Twitter search to see if anyone else is talking about the company you’re considering. Great, right? The problem at present is the volume of information is too low. Search for most products and services and you’ll find very little or nothing. There are millions of tweets, but very few actually create value for the readers! (my solution – charge people per tweet).
While today there might not be enough information on Twitter to make the search function really shine, over time this is guaranteed to change. Recently, Twitter announced that they are going to beef up their search function and actually begin to crawl the links that people post in their tweets! Now that could be powerful!
If you’re not on Twitter, you should check it out. If you’re on Twitter, but you’ve never used the search function you’re missing out!
Search is the super highway directing visitors around the web and we might be in the midst of a shift in how people use it…
