Recently, there has been talk of Google looking into purchasing popular micro-blogging service, Twitter. The general story floating around the internet (largely on Twitter, actually) is that Google is interested in the service predominantly for its search functionality, which allows users to search “tweets” in real time. I’d like to expand on this briefly, and I hope this will explain why Twitter’s search functionality is potentially valuable.
Twitter’s tweet search allows users to search tweets for various search strings (like one would via a search engine such as Google). With the advent of hashtags (# in front of a word), both searching and indexing of tweets around a topic are made easier. How could this be useful?
Let’s say you’re a soup manufacturer. Searching on Google for “soup” might yield some results… most of which will probably be useless to you. Searching on Twitter for #soup, however, will allow for direct access to commentary, queries or general information regarding soup on tweets tagged with #soup. Simply searching for the word “soup” would most likely yield similar results as well.
So, to recap, not only is the search real time (searches tweets and tweets are posted instantly), it allows for a short information snippet on the topic searched for.
If you’re not on Twitter, it’s about time to sign up, right?Â
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