Rebuttal: 6 Reasons Why Twitter Isn’t the Future of Search

I just read an interesting article on the RT wires about why Twitter’s the future of search. A statement that initially got a nod of the head, until I started thinking in a little more detail about the arguments. I think it’s really important here to actually talk a bit about what search is.

@Gyutae’s article seems to simply equate search with ‘finding information’, but there’s a slightly deeper dimension: you want to get all the information, or the most relevant information, or unbiased information, or…

Anyway, it’s not just about finding stuff, but about the quality and source of the stuff you find.

So, six reasons why Twitter isn’t the future of search:

Social isn’t representative

Asking Twitter for an opinion is all very well, but bear in mind you are getting the Twitterverse’s opinion, not everyone. Although Twitter is becoming more ‘mainstream’, you’re still looking at a certain type of user, in a somewhat self-selecting crowd.

If you’re after the best restaurants in New York, you’re likely to get a decent cross-section of Twitter replying, but if I’m looking for recommendations for a nail salon in Birmingham and nobody’s mentioned one on Twitter, I have to poll my own network. Which is great, if I have access to the sorts of people who would know. Otherwise I have to seek out a few likely people and @ them the question, wait for replies (if any), etc. A lot of work.

In short: Search queries that don’t match the Twitter userbase don’t get good answers.

Anti-information overload isn’t always informative

Sometimes you’re simply not searching for something that can be answered in 140 characters. Sure, Twitter encourages people to be concise with their information, but if I’m after a fairly detailed explanation of something – or a howto, or a tutorial – I won’t find that on Twitter. If someone’s tweeted a link with the appropriate text, I might find it, but Twitter just isn’t the platform to search for detail on.

Realtime makes overviews hard to find

Realtime search is great for realtime applications, such as finding out the exact response to an ad that just ran during the Super Bowl, or the latest football score. But if you want historical information as well as ‘the latest’, or an overview of an event rather than the blow-by-blow tweets, you get totally overloaded.

For example, digging through #sxsw tweets to find informative nuggets was just a nightmare. Realtime search definitely has its place, but it won’t ever be the only way we search.

It’s hard to pick out accuracy from the masses

This ties in a little with #1, in that ‘the masses’ is actually ‘the masses who use Twitter’. A level playing field is great, but the advantage of something like PageRank is that you do gain an idea of how respected, influential, popular, accurate, etc. a web page is — generally people linking to it are giving it a silent ‘thumbs up’, pushing its PageRank higher.

That’s just not there on Twitter, and for various search tasks, you actually want that sort of ranking and relevance, rather than just a mass of voices all shouting at once.

Direct contact with sources isn’t always the answer

If you had a question about what it’s like to be a comic, sending Stephen Fry an @ might get you a nice 140-character answer. But if you were doing biographical research, or wanted to ask any sort of question requiring a detailed answer, or actually have an in-depth conversation, you wouldn’t use Twitter search.

Leaving aside the fact that some Twitter celebrity accounts have been known to be fake, how much value from asking someone directly can you really get, compared to reading published information about them?

On the flipside, if you have a question that suits a very specific person – maybe not a celebrity, but how about an entrepreneurial mum from Wisconsin? – you can find that person from Twitter, whereas you’d be lost on a more conventional search engine (until you find WorkAtHomeMomsFromWisconsin.com, of course).

I’m not saying that this level of trust and source interaction is bad, but it’s not ‘the future of search’.

Location awareness is unreliable

Using just the location associated with a tweet and saying ‘every piece of content from this location is related to it’ is just plain silly. A lot of Twitter conversation is location-free, and the only real application of this is to resolve statements like ‘Back from Starbucks. Wow, what nice service!’ to mean ‘Starbucks in Edinburgh has nice service’ because Twitter knows I’m in Edinburgh. A lot of statements posted from a location talk about other locations, even.

Having some form of location-knowledge about a person is great, but it’s got to overcome some serious hurdles before it can accurately be used in search. However, it does make finding the aforementioned work at home mother easier, and location definitely is part of the future of the Web.

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