Will Twitter Kick Google’s Ass In Search?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

CNET reports that Twitter Search is adding a bot to crawl links, which will effectively turn the Twitter-only search service into a search engine that competes with Google. With one problem. Google doesn’t do real-time search.

In other words, Twitter will be filling a niche that Google doesn’t own. That’s got to piss off Google.

Google is great at a lot of things and practically invented search. At least as we know it today. But Google’s algorithms have moved in the direction completely the opposite of this new development (ie. domain age factor, authority-based relevance, etc.).

Now I’m not saying those are bad things, but they work against real-time search since they reward companies that build authority over the long term. Older domains do better in Google’s rankings than newer domains. Links from sites that have been around longer are weighted more importantly at Google than links from newer sites. As a result of these ranking factors, it is next to impossible for Google to compete with Twitter on real-time search. And until now it was totally feasible for Google to purchase Twitter and make the new girl its bitch. Not any more.

Real-time search changes everything. Why would Twitter sell to Google if the service can beat Google at its own game? And if they can crawl links and return real-time relevant searches based on user queries then Twitter will beat Google in one very important area: Returning the best of the latest information on any given topic. Twitter just might become the search engine Google haters love.