Will Twitter displace Google?

[Steve Rappaport (ARF)]

Some are arguing that Twitter is a social search engine and has the power, eventually, to supplant Google. I thought this morning that there might be some merit to this because the concept of the results page seems to be aging. Would it be an improvement if you could ask a community of friends the best source of information on a topic or location without having to wait for stuff to be indexed and/or scroll through lists and pages of hits. Would social search be faster and, because you know the recommending source, help you evaluate the info quickly and confidently?

These are some thoughts to get a conversation started. What're yours?

[Chris Philp]

In truth, before looking in to Twitter more thoroughly, my understanding of it was simply a status update site,which I really didn't care for - I think their search tool needs to be made more prevalent as a function within the site. For my friends and I at least, we had no idea of the search capabilities of Twitter.

I think as you say there is some merit to it, but if you consider searching for and sharing information with your friends - there's a limit to the knowledge and access of a group of friends have (unless of course you consider "friends" as including companies etc. too which only brings up bias and relevance once more)...which would mean people search out-with their friends...which again would take people back to the issue of scrolling and indexing. And if this caught on it'd only be a short time before it was utilised by advertisers and companies trying to make theirs the most relevant returns. It's a cycle.

Like many social networking sites that have come, gone and will continue to come and go, I think it'd be easier to assume that Google will survive this challenge.