Sudatta Mukherjee: Google

Twitter – The new search engine?

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I have a tendency of Google’ing everything on this Earth. Be it lipsticks, shoes or mobile phones. I Google about movie timings, ongoing sale offers, sunglasses, people, technology, just about everything. Whenever I need help I just Google. So much so that I don’t find it necessary to ask anyone about where to head for a nice lunch or where to watch movies. Although there is one problem that I face continuously. That is the numerous search results it returns. For example if I Google ‘movie timing of Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster’ it returns about 9,330,000 results to me, enough to confuse me and scroll and read through most of them. It is a tiring and time consuming process. Not only a tiring process but something that really irritates me.

The next best option is to ask people. However your buddies and your acquaintances won’t have the correct answer of your every query. It is impossible that they will know each and every matter. So what to do? Ask random people! That is what I do.

Twitter is a micro-blogging site. Although it is more powerful than large blog sites. One tweet can change the world. Change views. Become news. In the last one year every major news channels and newspapers have entered social networking with Twitter. Recently Delhi Airport registered itself. Then there are celebrities and country heads.

I found Twitter really helpful when it came to enquiring about different stuff. In the last one month I have enquired about mobile phones, books, movies, beer bottles, people, places and what not. I have never been disappointed with the suggestions and replies aka mentions. I didn’t have to go around and Google about them. In between the numerous replies I selected the ones that seem quite to the point and went ahead with it. What did I gain? Time and the trouble of going through each and every link that Google return, to know which will be the most helpful to me.

Yes there are times when I Google twitter replies too but my search gets narrowed. For example if I tweet about “which is the best android phone, budget 10k”; plus I add the technical term “Plz RT.” In minutes, although not seconds, I get my replies and reasons too. These reasons are short and to the point. I then know which can be trustworthy and influential. If I feel there is a need of doing a bit more Google search on the given replies, I do but by that time I have already got my answers.

There are limitations. Just like I don’t expect my friends to know the answer to every query there are matters which random people cannot answer also. That is where these search engines power over social networking. Also the way SEO folks work on making their results visible to the extreme level, it is expected that twitter or any other social networking site may not live to defeat them.

Still, imagine Twitter, a site where people are answering to your queries and not mechanical search engines where people are hired to work on improving search results. Imagine the power behind such a site which if they try can overpower the search engines.

One would argue that different firms are recruiting men to open their social media accounts, mostly twitter accounts and promote themselves through it. But there is a difference. When HCL replies to my random query about icore5 based laptop reviews, I will instantly know it is because they want themselves to be promoted. However at that moment if someone I don’t know or even know and is using such a product replies to me and updates me some reviews I will know which one to follow. Again the difference of Social Media folks is there main job is to attract visitors through socializing with them on different social media platforms, here Twitter.

Now it depends upon Jack Dorsey (Executive Chairman), Dick Costolo(CEO), Evan Williams (Director) and Biz Stone (Creative director) how they creatively use Twitter and how tweeters use this platform as a search engine. Whatever may be the future, Twitter and tweeters surely seem to help people in deciding about holiday plans, vacations, mobile phones, books, movies, etc. more than Google or any other search engine these days.

P.S. Google has a Twitter account. And Google’s reply to Twitter is Google+ which hit off quickly only to disappear slowly.