Have you noticed there is no definitive search engine for Twitter? There are certainly many attempts to search this social-networking site, such as Collecta, OneRiot, Scoopler and Twitter’s own search engine. But none of these delivers a structured, comprehensive view of what’s being said on Twitter.
The conversations are simply too fast to keep up with right now.
Google is a great tool for searching most websites, but it’s completely inadequate when it comes to finding or following a conversation on Twitter. Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, is at least making an effort to jump into the social-networking arena, according to an article in ComputerWorld, entitled “Bing beats Google to the punch, launches Twitter search.”
Bing has gone through and selected a number of Tweeters with the most followers and added their most recent tweets to their search results when you search for them. For instance, if you search for “Tony Hawk Twitter” you will find Tony Hawk’s latest tweet at the top of the page.
These are just baby steps into a whole new world of social media. The Internet was a big jumble of information before search engines came along to create some sense of order from the chaos. Chaos seems to rule social-media sites at the moment, but some structure could be coming soon. The algorithms will have to be even more complex and extremely fast to keep up with the instant nature of Twitter.
Search engines will have to find a way to rank Twitter results by the authority of the tweeters, how new the tweets are and how many people are talking about a specific topic, among other things. Important conversations could easily slip through the cracks if no one with much authority is talking about them and search engines focus too much on that aspect in their rankings.
There needs to be a balance between the chaos of conversation and the order or rankings. We’ll see what happens.
You can follow eHarbor, Inc. on Twitter to stay updated on all of our eHarbor Blog entries and other important ecommerce news.
The fake Twitter “Over Capacity” logo is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Mykl Roventine.
Tags: article, Bing, ComputerWorld, Ecommerce, eHarbor, google, Microsoft, news, online, search engine, Social Media, twitter, web
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