Twitter Poised to Leapfrog Google
There’s a real significant possibility that 2012 might be the year people started searching Twitter as their entryway to making decisions instead of Google.
There are two reasons why this could actually happen: t.co links and Korea:
In case you didn’t notice, last week Twitter took a major step forward, automatically wrapping every link longer than 20 characters in a t.co shortened link. This is a big big deal: it means that they now have mature enough technology to “see inside” every shortened link that passes through the system. Which means they can also start understanding the relationships between people and content immediately. One way to see this technology at work is by clicking the number next to the “tweet” button. Check out these search results on a recent article published in DMNews:
The search query is the URL, but the results return three different link shortners. Twitter is opening these links and the closing them back up, basically just for continuity of experience at this point. So while Google+ attempts to get people to attach +1 to their search results, Twitter will merely be exposing the mountain of existing shared links thanks to three years of tireless, quiet work under the hood. This is where Korea figures in…
As far as I know, Korea is still the only country where Google can’t get to the majority of the people using its service. In fact, they can only get about 5% of the country’s users to choose Google. Weird, right? Korea was the first country to have ubiquitous high-speed internet available to all citizens, and that culture uses a service called Navver. Where Google finds you Web pages based on Page Rank, Navver returns reviews which contain links to sites. Recommendations from people like you is most important, then looking for filtered links from those people follows.
There’s a powerful confluence here: Being able to effectively search for information filtered by how appropriate it is for you instead of just how relevant the page is to your search term? That’s the kind of valuable, interesting, entertaining result people will not only want, but find hard to turn away from; especially as we demand faster answers from people we are comfortable with, through exponentially faster, ubiquitous technology infrastructure.
What do you think? Continue the conversation here or @mleis.
Related posts:
