I’ve already gone on record saying that I think Twitter has the potential to unseat Google in search. I believe this precisely because they’re not trying to. Nobody will win against Google head-to-head, but perhaps, just perhaps, an upstart will create a fun new game in a new arena where people like to play, and the next thing you know Google’s wondering where all the traffic’s gone. Lots of smart people disagree with me — seven of them in this article alone. Danny Sullivan says that Twitter “simply doesn’t cover enough of the topics out there.” Andy Beal says, “There’s tremendous value in tapping into a fresh, up to the minute content, but people still rely on the structured, ranked data that Google’s web index provides.” Neil Patel is unambiguous: “Twitter will not replace Google in search.” Unashamedly, I persist. The problem of structured, ranked data can be solved, as Twitter adds relevance rankings to its search capabilities. And as Twitter grows its databank, it will cover enough of the topics out there — or certainly enough to represent a serious challenge to Google’s market-share domination. But all of those intellectual thought exercises pale besides one simple anecdote, told by Twitter vice president Santosh Jayaram and recounted by Rafe Needleman at CNet:
[Jayaram] told of being in the Twitter offices in San Francisco on March 30, when the Twitter engineers noticed that the word “earthquake” had suddenly started trending up. They didn’t know where the earthquake was. Several seconds later, their building started to shake. The earthquake had been in Morgan Hill, 60 miles south of San Francisco, and the tweets about the shaker reached the office faster than the seismic waves themselves. Google, you’re not even close to that fast — and our expectations will only go higher. Have you tried Twitter search? Do you Twitter at all? What do you think of its prospects?
