My Twitter Search Aha Moment

Bokardo has a nice post up about how Google is facing erosion on two fronts - the real time search front from Twitter, and on the engagement / advertiser front from Facebook.  Says Bokardo:

....Twitter will erode real-time searches. As Brynn explains, Twitter can’t compete in the broad search game, but the fact that people are always on Twitter means that’s where they’ll start. Instead of starting at Google, they’ll start at Twitter.

My Twitter Aha search moment came a few weeks ago while in Austin, TX.  It was the evening of Saturday, March 14 - two days before, Syracuse had defeated UCONN in a thrilling 6 overtime game.  I wanted to see if Syracuse had run the table and closed out Louisville to win the Big East tournament championship.  I didn't feel like wading through ESPN's menu heavy site to get to their scoreboard.  And because it was just after the game would have ended, neither Google search nor Google News would have had the results yet.

So I used Twitter Search.  And there is was - result after result telling me that Louisville had defeated Syracuse to win the Big East Tournament.

This wasn't an earthquake situation, and it certainly wasn't a matter of life and death.  But I needed to find a piece of information, and after considering the options, I started with Twitter search.

Google's crawl / index / update process is unbelievably fast and efficient.  I routinely see content getting indexed and ranking in Google search in under 24 hours.  When you consider the number of pages on the web, this is an astonishing achievement.

But it's not real time.

In the area of real time search, Twitter is doing a better job of organizing the world's information than Google is.

This is a small, but notable erosion in Google's search dominance.