Twitter Bootstraps Itself with Bing and Google

By Dan Weingrod on 11/04 (0) Comments •
tagged: Bing, Google, Search, Social Media, Twitter

To get a better handle on this it helps to understand more about the importance of real-time search.  From its inception Search has been about long-term established presence. Organic, or natural, search listings are derived from search engines spiders using it algorithms to rank existing pages based on relevance to a search term. Not only could this take months, but often older and more established sites would gain higher ranking based on their longevity.  Paid Search changed the theory slightly by combining the ability to adjust search results with timely search ads and guide traffic to relevant pages.  Things got closer to real time when  Search Engines realized that searchers were using engines to find breaking news stories. This brought news and blogs into the mainstream of Search results with innovations such as Google’s Universal Search. But even this level of timeliness does not match up to the potential of Real Time Search and that is because News does not have the breadth, scope and trust factor of Social Media.

As Facebook and Twitter became increasingly popular, search engines were faced with a new problem. Not only was there a new  and growing stream of information that was not being searched, but the source of that stream involved relevant conversation within  trusting social circles. This is what the importance of Real Time Search is about. It is less about the “real time” immediacy and more about the ability to capture this huge communication stream and focus its relevance for the Web searcher. Because, at its core, Search is all about relevance.

With that said it is interesting how Bing and Google have taken two completely different tacks in their approach to relevance and their Twitter partnership.

Bing beat Google to the punch and essentially creating a more classic search engine integration for Twitter.  But they did it with some nice touches. Visiting www.bing.com/twitter you first hit a cloud tag which gives you a great grounding as to what is happening “right now” in the tweetstream.  If you conduct a search Bing does a great job of parsing out the results in terms of Tweets, relevant links and potentially arcane, but relevant results. I recently saw the Coen Brothers’  “A Serious Man”. When I searched for it with Bing’s Twitter search it presented links to “Schrödinger's cat” a subject just barely mentioned in the movie. Quantum mechanics aside, it seems that Bing’s plan for Twitter adoption is very straight forward. Their goal is to incorporate Twitter into search results at a very high volume and in as traditional way as possible. This clearly shows that their main target is Google.

Google is taking Real Time Search in a completely different direction and is less concerned about what the other engines are doing. Google’s approach to what it is calling “Social Search”  is to incorporate twitter as well as other social media results from people in your social network into your general search results. So while Bing will deliver a set of tweets about a movie from people you don’t know. Google’s Social Search will deliver results based on relevant tweets from people in your “expanded social circle”. These results will appear in your Google search results if you have created a Google profile and friends in your circle have posted relevant information to their social networks. By taking this approach Google is combining the immediacy of real time search with the trust and relevancy of a social circle. What’s the target for Google?  By basing their model on an expanded social network Google seems to be betting that their role will be to unify a user’svarious social media memberships and roll them into one set of results. A sort of grand unifying theory of social media that presents a direct challenge to the leading social media platform:  Facebook.

Google’s real problem will be to get enough of a critical mass to create Google profiles to make this work. Twitter on the other hand comes out of this situation as a clear “winner without a business model”. By gaining central stage on the two of the three major search engines Twitter gains the credibility and branding that Wikipedia achieved by optimizing their pages and becoming the premiere online encyclopedia. This will help make their brand synonymous with short status messaging or microblogging into which Facebook continues to make inroads.

For marketers the adoption of Real Time Search, in whatever format succeeds, is part of the growing opportunity to take advantage of communication that is based on the valuable factors of user generated buzz and Social Marketing trust. These can be powerful channels if they can be harnessed properly, but clearly they are most likely going to continue to morph into new incarnations for the foreseeable future.