How Google and Twitter need to work together

by Patrick Altoft on January 26, 2009 / 2 responses

Bobbie Johnson has an article in The Guardian today asking if Twitter is polluting Google with useless results.

Now, I’m not knocking Twitter (even if I am fed up of reading about it): it’s perfectly fine if I want to share short messages with my friends. But when I’m searching for information on Google, Twitter isn’t necessarily going to give me much value back.

In a way, I suppose, it’s like searching the library for a particular book and – instead of finding the copy you’re looking for – finding clippings of newspaper reviews of it, or discovering a bunch of notes from people who have read it.

I agree with Bobbie – seeing a short message is almost as useless as being directed to a page on Digg rather than the original article. Google needs to change the rules on this and work with partners such as Digg and Twitter.

First they need to learn to consider following the links in Twitter messages and Digg story pages and show users the actual destination page without making them pass through another site first.

Secondly they need to start ranking these sort of sites lower than the original page.

Thirdly they need to work with Twitter to ensure they are indexing the breaking queries and clustering tweets based on keywords correctly. For example if I searched Google during a plane crash then Google should be directing me to the Twitter search results for that query.

Google struggles to find results in real time for the hottest breaking queries but Twitter has that information on tap. Why are they not working together?

A Google Twitter partnership gives the best crowdsourced real time search engine we could ever hope for.

Post category: Search Tweet

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.