Twitter Search Wars - Google Now Competing with Bing

It seems like Google is playing cat and mouse with Bing (Microsoft) to dominate Twitter-based results in their search engines.

Here is a post I wrote last week about Bing indexing Twitter results. It seems like mere days later that Google is announcing the release of their own Twitter based search service. Google has quite a way to go if they wish to compete with Bing for the ‘real-time’ social search market considering Bing have already made agreements with Facebook to start including user content in search.

I have already discussed this technology with a few of our colleagues, and the main feedback seems to be ‘how will this be useful’? This is a very valid question as Twitter tends to be one of those technologies which gets hyped as a blanket solution to online marketing and online news. However, there does seem to be some merit to this type of search and here’s what Google have to say about it:

“Tweets and other real-time data streams are valuable to Google and Bing because for many types of searches (news, events, sports, stocks, shopping, etc.), the most recent information is often the most relevant. And its hard to beat millions of people Tweeting out their thoughts”the pulse of the planet, if you will”for real-time information about every subject imaginable.”

We can see at least 3 benefits of this:

1) Twitter will become more relevant to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

2) Social posting may have even more influence than it does currently by reaching a wider audience of non-Twitter users

3) The speed of news in search engines will increase dramatically

A possible con is that there is now even less editorial process between user contributed news and search engine results, and more possibility for Google bombing via Twitter posts and ‘piggy-backing’ trending-topics in order to spam. Google is very good at filtering out this type of information, so it will be interesting to see if this is how they corner the market.