The Fail Whale

Microsoft’s search engine Bing has struck a deal with Face­book and the hot micro-messaging ser­vice Twit­ter, a brash attempt to add real-time web updates to its search results in order to make Google look like a lum­ber­ing dinosaur.

While we’re still digest­ing the news of Bing adding Twit­ter to its search engine, Google has some news of their own: they’re about to do the same exact thing.

Search­ing Twit­ter traf­fic ini­tially seems kind of odd.  Then, after a bit of thought, it starts to sound a bit bet­ter.  Finally, after a lot of reflec­tion, it starts to ven­ture into the realm of the bizarre.  Here a quick sum­mary of the stages of acceptance:

1 — Odd­ity:  Why would you want to add Twit­ter traf­fic to a search engine?  Twit­ter is all about quick thoughts between you and your ten thou­sand clos­est friends.  Search engines are sup­posed to be good at answer­ing ques­tions, and most ques­tions require more than 140 char­ac­ters to answer com­pletely.  (I’ll blithely ignore the ques­tion of whether most peo­ple doing searches actu­ally care about com­plete answers.)  On first blush, it doesn’t seem like a great match.

2 — Sense:  So why would Google and Microsoft be inter­ested in index­ing tweets, then?  Assum­ing it’s more than just a PR chasing-buzzwords stunt (not nec­es­sar­ily a good assump­tion, but…) how would index­ing tweets add value to the core of their search busi­nesses?  Well, if you treat tweets more as meta­data than search data, it starts to make more sense.  A good per­cent­age of tweets con­tain links, and once you fil­ter out spam you’re left with a lot of links that have been determined–by actual humans!–to be inter­est­ing.  Machine intel­li­gence is great, but humans are still bet­ter at fig­ur­ing out which pages are worth­while and which aren’t…this is the idea behind Mahalo and the like.  If Google and Microsoft can mine that data to improve the qual­ity of their hits, index­ing tweets sud­denly makes more sense.

3 — Non­sense:  But if that’s the goal, why make the tweets them­selves search­able?  That’s going back to treat­ing the tweets as actual data again, which seems ques­tion­able at best.  If peo­ple start to see their tweets show up in search engines that will change the way Twit­ter is used.  Right now it’s treated as an ephemeral medium; incor­rectly in the­ory, since Twit­ter is already search­able, but given how well Twitter’s search engine works, it might actu­ally be true.  With sto­ries pop­ping up all over the place remind­ing peo­ple to be cau­tious about what they put on Face­book or MySpace, does Twit­ter really want to be included in the list of ser­vices to fear?  I’m sure there are good reasons–probably money–for Twit­ter to get involved in this deal, but it’s not with­out risk.

via Bing Part­ners With Twit­ter and Face­book for Real-Time Search and  BREAKING: Google Announces Search Deal With Twit­ter.