Twitter the second largest searchengine?

Johannes Beus
For a while now, we've had the same game every month: Twitter announces how many searchqueries they've processed the month before and some quality-journalists put these number in relation to data from Google Yahoo and Bing. Then Twitter gets crowned Google-killer. Something is not right here, is there?

The first problem arises from the fact that the data used comes from entirely different sources. To get the number of searchqueries for the large searchengines, you generally use an evaluation from comScore or a similar, external provider. Those will hopefully use a meaningful panel themselves, which gets you data that can be compared to each other – but not with external numbers.

The second problem is the completely differing definition of “searchquery”: for the searchengines this is rather clear – the user enters in a keyword, finds whatever they were looking for and you get your completed searchquery. Sadly, Twitter counts something completely different. When Spiegel Online integrates a Twitter-stream-box within their left navigation during a World Cup game with German participation, then Twitter will count every Spiegel page-view as a searchquery. The same is true for the numerous API-clients: my Tweetdeck “searches” for “sistrix” every 5 minutes, which makes about 250 searchqueries a day, more than 8.000 a month. Is this a value that we can compare?
Johannes Beus - on Fri (07/09/2010) at 11:02 AM

Add Comment

more
This posting is older than 30 days and therefore closed for new comments.