Find out Whether Twitter Search Could Threaten Google

In the last 6 months it has been impossible to avoid the exponential rise in popularity of Twitter. With prominent companies using its service to launch products or announce services and celebrities racing one another to reach one million followers the micro blogging site has asserted itself as a dominant force in the social networking world. In March Neilson.com reported that Twitter had grown by 1382% through the previous month to reach a figure of 6million unique visitors monthly.

With the enormous number of users, and subsequently posts, Twitter has become a fascinating place to follow up to the minute news and developments. Currently on each user’s homepage Twitter provides a “trending topics” bar. This lists the most popular Tweet topics at the moment and these topics will virtually always match up with the major news and current event stories.

At present Twitter has its own search engine which can only be used to search within the site. Recently, in a discussion with Rafe Needleman of cnet, Twitter’s vice president Santosh Jayaram discussed their plans to develop this search engine to include pages from all over the internet. Jayaram outlined a plan to index web pages by following links found within user’s tweets. By allocating strength to these web pages, based on both the quantity of tweets and the perceived reputation of users that are linking to it, Twitter would be able to provide a search results that place a lot more emphasis on real user recommendations. Twitter also plans to follow and index pages that are found linked in Tweets as soon as they are posted. This means that the information provided is completely up to date and allows the search results to focus on recent or currently popular results.

The question that people are asking now is whether or not this advanced Twitter search could begin to trouble Google’s dominance of the search engine market and what effect it will have on the search engine optimisation industry. Ultimately it looks unlikely that Twitter itself will be able to threaten Google. While Twitter is gaining popularity at an enormous rate it is still nowhere near as prevalent as Google. In addition to this Twitter currently boasts a particularly low user retention figure, with only 40% of those that sign up continuing to use the site. However Twitter is definitely putting itself in a position to be acquired by one of the major search engines (most likely Google or Microsoft). From an SEO perspective Twitter will unlikely provide a seismic shift in SEO practises, instead it reflects and slightly advances the recent trends found encouraging the use of social media sites for marketing purposes. Overall the most likely outcome of Twitter search expanding to include the web will be to trigger a similar move from Google, who will continue to dominate the search industry.

No matter what search engine is being used it is vital to use SEO to effectively optimise a site. Many site owners don’t have the time to devote to this personally but there are a number of seo companies that can provide the necessary services.