Allen Weiner

Both Google and Microsoft (Bing) have announced plans to add Twitter results (and, in case of Microsoft, Facebook updates) to search results. This is an interesting achievement for sure, but one that leaves me in major so-what mode. There has been a lot of buzz around searching the real-time web, and both search giants have responded to that buzz with technically sound implementations. I offer this somewhat odd analogy: I am in my car driving on a major freeway and look to my in-car navigation dashboard for a way to circumvent an upcoming traffic jam. Aside from providing me such useful information as “escape routes” gleaned from official traffic sources, the GPS also tells me who’s honking their horns a few miles ahead as well as what traffic jams I would be likely to find in a freeway 100 miles away. In parallel, the real-time web offers information that is sometimes useful, sometimes interesting but often just silly sounds from strangers along the social superhighway. Unless search giants can parse the real-time web into comments that have authority as well as offer contextual relevance, these Tweets and Bleats are just noise.

As Yahoo learned with Yahoo Answers, presenting algorithmic search results with those offered by real-life humans is a challenge. That same challenge exists in blending algo results with those from Twitter and Facebook. As more content sources begin to become part of a one-box search experience, presenting them to consumers in a navigationally simple UI, will take the search world 10 blue links to 100 blue links. Lastly, I can see the merits of digging meaningful nuggets out of Twitter but still don’t understand what Facebook updates provide as value-add to search results. When I type in the search query “health clubs” do I really want to know that someone on the other side of the globe is at his health club? As my teenaged daughter would say, that’s TMI.