A few weeks ago I after hearing a lot of talk about Twitter search, I asked myself how that might be helpful. So, I set about to try to figure it out. This is my account of my three week effort.
The purpose of my little research project was to determine how Twitter search might be useful apart from Google web search. I decided to do a somewhat informal project, so be warned this is not exhaustive, scientific, or rigorous-just my experience.
Like everyone, I've been using Google forever, but in this case I want to only find recent items so, I have used Google Alerts to get new items. I also did this to level the playing field since Twitter search has a somewhat limited time horizon. I mirrored these searching in Twitter search and subscribed to both result sets using an RSS reader.
Now, I also wanted somewhat limited results, so I only did five searches on each. I chose searches that didn't have anything to do with social media, social networking, marketing, etc. I did this to try to limit the echo-chamber affect. So, I chose other things I'm interested in, also so I could determine the overall value from a normal user's viewpoint. I searched for: smooth-coated otters; GTD Moleskine hacks; pop-up businesses; Aubrey Maturin series; and two kingdom doctrine. Again, these are very narrow topics on purpose.
After 21 days, here are my limited initial results.
Smooth-coated otters. Limited results returned on either Google or Twitter. The results were interesting in that the Google results pointed me to scientific information where Twitter pointed me to popular culture 'events.'
GTD Moleskine hacks. Lots of results were seen due to the trendy nature of all the terms. The Google results tended to point me to 'How-To' where Twitter pointed me to the actual people doing the hacks in a very timely (meaning it was easy to start a conversation with them) way. Interestingly, these conversations were more interesting.
Pop-up businesses. Poor results all-around. This term showed up in a 'Business Week' as a trend in businesses in the next few years. Neither produced any helpful results.
Aubrey Maturin series. Lots of results on Twitter and very few on Google. Interestingly, there are a lot of results historically on Google, but few new items in their index. Twitter had a fairly large number of people talking about the book series. Like the GTD Moleskine hack search it lead me more directly to people to start conversations with.
Two kingdom doctrine. Only Google produced any results.
Twitter search is better for: Current events, popular culture, and direct access to people for the purpose of continuing conversations.
Google is better for: current research findings (formal) in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (with the possible exception of computer technology), how-to documents, and historical documents which I purposely left unexplored.
What are your thoughts?