Twitter is not a search engine

I’ll confess, I don’t understand this new twitter-as-search-engine meme. In my opinion anyone who tries to tell you otherwise has either drank too deeply of the kool-aid 140 characters at a time, is trying to get you to fund it or is trying to convince Google to buy it (so that they can break that, too). Adding a few lame pictures of your backyard does not make your site a photolog, nor does adding search functionality to content make a site a search engine, no matter how wide the topics it spans might be.

Here are a few key reasons Twitter is a lot of things, but it is no more a search engine than Digg or Wikipedia is.

• Content: Twitter’s big ‘thing’ is that every thought that you pour out into the universe can only be 140 characters.  There’s an art form to  manipulating as much content into those characters as possible a la haiku - but at some point you’re still going to run into a supreme lack of usable content around a given topic unless you’re ready to click hundreds of tinyURLs.
• Ranking: Twitter’s searches, at least for the moment, can only be based on recentness and not by other factors.
• Depth: Reputation does not factor a whit into how its search results are compiled. Searching for ‘Travel’ doesn’t bring up people who twitter largely about travel, but the last ten people who used the word ‘travel’ in a tweet.
• Spam-a-rama: Suspending suspicious accounts just isn’t cutting it, Twitter is absolutely covered in spam that dilutes meaningful searches. Yeah, search engines fight this too, but at least they manage to introduce other factors into their search algorithms that can combat more than recentness.
• Singular source: A search engine provides results from a wide variety of sources and types of sites. Twitter’s search function searches among its own content blocks, which encompass only one source (twitter.com), one format (text) and, while there may be variations in the general tone of the content, how much variance can you possibly squeeze into 140 characters?
• Purpose: Twitter is content. It is not the means to search content.

That’s not to say it’s not immensely valuable as an information source. It’s a magical intersection of instant messaging and blogging: The latest and greatest, shared out to your friends and hangers-on with the ability to turn it into a conversation (i.e. what bloggers always said they were in terms of being in the moment – blogs aren’t dead because of twitter, just little better defined). That the conversations are getting indexed allows you to look at what people are talking about – immensely valuable to brands, individuals and content builders alike who can use it for information. That makes it a buzz index or a review compendium. It makes it Yahoo Answers without, you know, all the information. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s just a gauge of activity from a singular source rather than a compendium of knowledge from across the web.

I understand that you love you some Twitter. I understand that it’s changed your life. I understand that it offers a lot of opportunity to discuss and promotes ideas and products. I like it too, but it is no more a search engine than it is a pepperoni pizza, each of which is the only thing that will do when that’s what you really need.

But there have been enough damn articles on this in the last 24 hours that surely someone has a reason that none of this matters. Someone want to tell me why Twitter is now a search engine, or about times that they’ve searched Twitter for something because they wanted to and not because they were too lazy to open a new window / tab to check an actual search engine?

Mom says there are no posts that are like me. I am unique.

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