Twitter investing in search
When it looked like the monetisation of Twitter might be through integrating search results on Google through the addition of ‘real time’ , it now seems that they’re investing in their own areas of search. This is good, as it could well secure the future of Twitter as a viable business and not just a powerful online tool. Louis Gray recently posted about how Twitter has hired search guru Krishna Gade (previously of Bing). It’s been clear from the start that Twitter has had a clear focus on search, since the acquisition of summize.com. Often though, their search experience is negligible.
The search capabilities of Twitter are huge, but is something that needs attention. There needs to be improvements made both for the way you can find tweets, as well as how you find people to follow. The ‘find people’ function on Twitter could certainly see improvements, as it is currently fairly limited and doesn’t provide a very insightful search experience. But what needs obvious attention is the search function for individual tweets. This rarely goes back further than a few days, unless you’re lucky and I’m often frustrated that information I know is there just isn’t showing up through their search engine. The ability to search by location is also confusing and can be easily simplified to provide a better user experience. Why, on advanced search, can I not just enter ‘Dublin’ as a location, having to opt instead for 5 miles, 50 miles etc.. within a location?
I expect that there will also be many changes to be made to Twitter’s search integration with other sites. Even though Twitter has an open API, I think there can be huge strides made in providing a more official presence for Twitter search – think along the lines of Google‘s custom search bar here.
Room for improvement
The massive advantage Twitter has is that there are other search engines out there that are attempting to address the problems that Twitter search currently has and providing solutions, such as the ability to search only within the people you follow. What Twitter can do is learn from the people that have been out there answering our problems to search and easily integrate them with the site, providing a more intuitive search function that increasingly draws us into the site. When Twitter introduced their saved search option for example, I know that I used Tweetdeck’s search function less, appreciating the fact that I could access my searches quickly and easily no matter where I was logging on. This is the kind of thing that Twitter can turn to its advantage (provided they don’t mess things up like they did with their retweet feature).
What we’ll all be watching closely of course is how/if Twitter starts to support sponsored search ads, which is certainly an area that Krishna has experience in. Search has long been Twitter’s trump card, we just haven’t seen them really use it yet. The hire of Krishna could signal that Twitter are about to come out fighting and could just hit Google where it hurts, providing an ultimately different search function that takes all the good things about their site and what they do well and turns it into a profitable tool.
