Does Real-Time Search Make Twitter a Google Killer? Its Fanbots Think So (BoomTown Not Quite Yet).
by Kara Swisher
Posted on February 9, 2009 at 6:38 AM PT
According the latest meme to sweep the digerati over the last several days, here are the words that should make the brainiac satraps over at Google very, very nervous: “See what’s happening–right now.”
That’s the motto right below the box on Twitter’s search engine–a page that looks awfully familiar to anyone who uses the Internet, since it is essentially a light-blue-colored rip-off of Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” mantra.
But, posits the new theory, it’s Google (GOOG) that should perhaps not be feeling so lucky when it comes to Twitter search because it is becoming the place for what is now being called “real-time” search.
Yesterday there was a Silicon Alley Insider piece alarmingly titled “Google Next Victim Of Creative Destruction?” by former AOLer John Borthwick–who should know a thing or two about the topic, given that he was a top exec at the once-vaunted online service as it imploded.
In it, relating a presentation to AOL execs in their heyday by the well-known management author, Clay Christensen, here’s Borthwick’s money quote:
[Christensen] said time and time again disruptive business confuse adjacent innovation for disruptive innovation. They think they are still disrupting when they are just innovating on the same theme that they began with. As a consequence they miss the grass roots challenger–the real disruptor to their business. The company who is disrupting their business doesn’t look relevant to the billion dollar franchise, it’s often scrappy and unpolished, it looks like a sideline business, and often its business model is TBD. With the AOL story now unraveled–I now see search as fragmenting and Twitter search doing to Google what broadband did to AOL.”
Having written an entire book about the disaster that became AOL, I would have to disagree a lot with Borthwick that the innovation of broadband killed the company.
For example, I would have started with AOL’s ponzi-scheme of an advertising business model, gross mismanagement, greed, backstabbing between Time Warner (TWX) and AOL after the merger and a complete noninterest in innovation in AOL’s later years as the key reasons for its demise, before I even got to broadband.
That aside, Borthwick does go on to make an interesting argument I have been hearing a lot of late among the digerati: that Twitter’s search results–and not its often-inane tweets–are its real treasure.
An investor in a start-up called Summize that was acquired by Twitter and is now its search engine, Borthwick correctly focuses on some interesting splintering off of two key search areas, video and real-time search.
Google already owns plain-vanilla search in a game-over way, with a disturbing share that just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
And, given Google’s ownership of YouTube and the fact that the online video service massively dominates the online video market, the search giant effectively owns video search. (One might note that it has been, heretofore ineffectively, hard at work trying to monetize it.)
But it is Twitter, as it quickly increases its user base from one million to three million to six million–and, doubtlessly, millions more now–that is the king of real-time search, which is to say, search that is done as news events unfold (the plane in the Hudson River, an earthquake, the Super Bowl, whatever) or other ongoing topics of the day.
Thus, while Google essentially controls the pages of about everything on the Internet, Twitter owns the social conversation online.
Writes Borthwick:
Imagine you are in line waiting for coffee and you hear people chattering about a plane landing on the Hudson. You go back to your desk and search Google for plane on the Hudson–today–weeks after the event, Google is replete with results–but the DAY of the incident there was nothing on the topic to be found on Google. Yet at http://search.twitter.com the conversations are right there in front of you. The same holds for any topical issues–lipstick on pig?–for real time questions, real time branding analysis, tracking a new product launch–on pretty much any subject if you want to know whats happening now, search.twitter.com will come up with a superior result set.”
Unfortunately, after that, except just stating that Google will inevitably fall over and die, because of the Twitter effect, Borthwick provides absolutely no explanation of what possible business model could make real-time search that kind of killer.
Will it be a text-based online advertising model like Google’s AdSense? Or are people who Twitter and search Twitter not as open to such ads when they are conversing?
Or could Twitter sell the analytics from these social searches to big brands, so they can do a deep dive into consumer behavior? Or is the bulk of that chatter–like, say, “Cheetos are yummy, but messy”–completely useless to them?
Does Twitter winning in real-time search mean no one wants regular Web search anymore? Or can both co-exist and be lucrative?
“Who knows?” is probably a better answer to all of this at this point, given how nascent and small the Twitter audience–save for in the noisy echo chamber of Silicon Valley and the media, where it looms large–still is.
That’s not to say I don’t use Twitter search more and more or that it’s probably a whole lot easier to monetize the start-up’s search than the content of its 140 characters.
Said a Twitter insider who is watching its search business grow a lot and notes that it is much bigger than people realize: “The search results are distinct to anything out there.”
That is true, and I would also say it is extremely useful too (even though bigger will inevitably make it less so, as there will be more dreck to slog through).
That’s why Facebook, as first reported here, made that $500 million run at Twitter and also why it opened its APIs on status this week to slow Twitter’s growth and cut its momentum a bit.
But Facebook also made the move to help itself. After all, many more young people–for all Twitter’s buzz–use its status update (ask some–I did), so it is in Facebook’s interest to keep it that way.
Of course, Google could also try to kill Twitter, by starting its own real-time search service, although that is the kind of innovative and viral thing that big companies usually cannot pull off as easily or deftly.
And it would come as no surprise if Google made an even larger bid for Twitter, given its interest in owning all search.
Or not, if Twitter can’t find a way to make real and sustained money from any of its many interesting parts, like search.
I, for one, hope it does, since it’d be nice to see someone tweet, um, tweak, the mighty Google for once, even if it does not have murder in mind.
Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.
Comments
I twitter and I google. When I want to search, I google. Twitter lacks the ability to overtake Google. The technology gap between them is like earth to moon with a ladder.
Posted by Tony McCune at February 9th, 2009 at 7:40 amThere is still some way for Twitter to become a serious threat as both its user and revenue base is still low, but Facebook told us the first can go quite fast, and the second can be delayed a bit …
Posted by Amaury de Buchet at February 9th, 2009 at 8:20 amAs for real-time events (like Olympic Games, catastrophes … or the Presidential Inauguration ceremony) Facebook has recently shown it can stand up to Twitter. FB / CNN’s experience was much better than Twitter / Current TV’s, for at least 2 reasons : A) the viral effect was much bigger via the Facebook feed, and B) who cares about search when all you need to do is to tune in … like we were all accustomed to do with TV …
As for Twitter search experience, it is true they have with their open API / mashups policy plenty of lessons to built upon … which they haven’t do yet. Great stuff like Twittervision still lack precious functionalities : just imagine how you could zoom in on places on Earth and listen to the chatter / tweets ?
Search.twitter.com is fine for a quick “is this happening or isn’t it” search. But in the Hudson example, if someone said “did you hear about the plane that landed in the hudson?”, my knee-jerk reaction would to be news.google.com, not a twitter search.
Sure, google’s main search page probably won’t display immediate results, but that’s because it’s not supposed to. It’s an unfair comparison.
Google News, on the other hand, is a more fair comparison. And frankly, I’ll take reputable news sources over Twitter users any day.
Posted by Matthew Harms at February 9th, 2009 at 9:30 amApple might enter this space, which would things all the more interesting…Do you macTM?
Posted by Mark Omega at February 9th, 2009 at 11:41 amKara, I agree with you and infact even before the business model one needs to see that the NOW web way way larger than what you see on twitter. I posted some thoughts here: http://blog.betterlabs.net/200.....ont-be-a-v
ictim-of-twitter-why-johns-theory-may-be-flawed/ and here are some of the key points:
* The NOW web is not just on twitter. In fact there is a much much larger NOW web happening on millions of forums, email lists, blog comments and message boards around the web. They are as active as twitter and have a wealth of information being added every minute, similar to twitter. I know that from a recent example where I found out about the US Air plane landing in the Hudson river on twitter, while my wife found out about it on a baby forum that she reads regularly and she may have found out only a few hours after me, or perhaps sooner. These are real time conversations happening NOW which are not on twitter. So I believe the NOW web is much larger than just twitter and in fact it may take a really long time for the rest of the NOW web to discover and adopt/switch to twitter, if at all they do. I don’t see a reason for this to happen. And guess what, Google has all the forums and other conversation destinations in their index.
Posted by Vaibhav Domkundwar at February 9th, 2009 at 12:23 pm* Yes, I know what you are thinking. Google has indexed all these forums (and other such destinations that have real time conversations) but they don’t have the real real time data indexed in real time. That is true and Google will definitely have to come up with a solution to index this real time data in real time or almost real time, but when and if it does that twitter will be a small fraction of the real time data. Twitter may still have the real real time data surface faster than Google, lets assume, but what percentage of conversation data on twitter is something that you want exactly when it happens, besides breaking news updates? Almost all of the rest can be consumed a few minutes or hours or days later too. So Google’s solution will be pretty good.
* Google may not have to do a now.google.com but just add a time-based slicing of results on their current search results listing like Now, 24 hours, 3 days, 7 days and All time. In fact, this is something we have tried with an experiment here at BetterLabs, where we created a bargains site based on RSS feeds and made a decision to show all browse and search results by time as bargains data has a defined shelf life. You can see an example here. Google will not cannibalize Google.com by adding a timeline and in fact may create a greater value for search users to see the time-based results. I am sure this is not an easy problem to solve but may not be more difficult than what they have solved already. So when they solve/address this problem/need, Google.com will become still more valuable and it will deliver a lot more of the NOW web that twitter will or can because twitter has only its own data to show and not of the rest of the NOW web.
* I am not sure if the YouTube and video search comparison is valid as video is a completely different media format, where as NOW web or real time conversation is still text data that we read, similar to the historical web. So a regular Google user will seamlessly access the new NOW web results that Google surfaces and I am not sure I see any difference in experience in doing so.
* When Google does add the time-based NOW web search, it will be able to surface a lot more trends that are happening right now on forums and other conversation destinations. For example, recently there was a conversation on one of the forums about the possibility of High Fructose Corn Syrup containing products having traces of mercury which is bad for health. This is just one of the valuable conversational findings Google could surface amongst millions and Google has better access to this data today than anyone else. This is no different than a trending topic within just the twitter ecosystem.
Hi Kara. I think your skeptical but plausible take is about right.
But what about that photo of Cheetos? That’s not fair. It’s 5:30pm and I’m a bit hungry and now I’ve got a craving for Cheetos!
Posted by fred wilson at February 10th, 2009 at 2:33 pmtwitter isn’t comprehensive and search needs to be…the bar is too high for a bunch of twits
Posted by Sam Harrison at February 10th, 2009 at 5:56 pmFred:
Thanks!
Cheetos are in the mail.
Posted by Kara Swisher at February 10th, 2009 at 9:36 pmI think twitter is too “one-size fits all” to make any sense, really. I expect 1000’s of twitter knock-offs within the next year, especially if laconi.ca finally gets around to making its code easily available for novices to implement (otherwise, someone else might
… — so by 2009 I expect there will be 1000’s of twitter streams for 1000’s of topics, and the one-size fits-all twitter.com site will be left to the spammers (who are already flooding in).
BTW: I just tweeted basically that — see http://twitter.com/nmw/status/1212480998
nmw
Posted by Norbert Mayer-Wittmann at February 15th, 2009 at 7:52 amoops — same idea, different year (make it 2010
Posted by Norbert Mayer-Wittmann at February 15th, 2009 at 7:58 am“It’s time for a thousand Twitters to bloom.”
http://www.scripting.com/stori.....press.html
Posted by Norbert Mayer-Wittmann at February 20th, 2009 at 3:59 amIf Twitter is ever successfully monetized, it will be by providing access to the knowledge that comes from its user-contributed content, not from asking users to pay for the tool through subscriptions, or through time and attention spent on advertising.
The real potential is in providing information to businesses on their brands and on their target market. Once Twitter finds a way to package this data in a way that’s usable and actionable, we could see it turn into a grown-up business model.
Posted by Brent Billock at March 5th, 2009 at 7:52 am