The Future Of Social Search (Or Why Google Should Buy Facebook)
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/28/the-future-of-social-search-or-why-google-should-buy-facebook/

Will Google buy....

Google used to get 100% of my queries. Today, I bet Twitter is getting at least 10% of them. There are some things Twitter is just flat out better at for getting information than Google.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Flewmoorman.com%2Fgoogles-first-real-threat-twit

Author noted he does almost all searching in firefox search bar. Recently noticed that am changing the settings there frequently. Google used to get 100% of my queries. Today, bet Twitter is getting at least 10% of them.

Clever. "Twitter is building a human powered search indexing engine. It is an engine that will build better results than any rules based index and has gotten millions of people super motivated to contribute for free every day (even though they don’t know it)."

The article's overall argument is a huge exaggeration, but the notion that searching across Twitter is better than searching across the entire Web for certain types of information has some truth to it. Especially for product reviews, the search space on Twitter is much less clogged with manufacturers and third-party distributors trying to sell shit -- basically, because of the social culture of Twitter, mentions of any product you might search for will be described and discussed from a personal and social point of view. However, this only works insofar as people treat Twitter as a personal messaging and status update service. I'm sure the Internet was great for product reviews too before companies started making their own websites. So if Twitter monetizes by building platforms for corporations, then it will become far less useful for product information. I don't buy the other advantage (evaluating readership through links) at all, because Google does the same thing with PageRank.

Real-time Web search (of streams of activities) is a hot topic right now. Everyone, including Google and Microsoft, recognizes the value of using trusted contacts as filters. What was once called social search is now called real-time search, but this time it will really happen. First, it will be applied to streams and then to the Web in general.

Here is an idea so obvious that it is surprising Twitter has not implemented it already: front-load search results with people you follow. When you search for, say, "Wilco" on Twitter today, the results are in the chronological order. That is not really relevant because you do not know who most of these people are. But if instead you could see people you follow, the search results would be much more useful.