Twitter social search engine

Twitter’s internal search engine should be a dream come true to those who have been heralding “social search”, layer of personalised/ crowd sourced content over the top of search results, yet it still has a long way to go. Twitter’s search functionality has come a long way, allowing searches for hashtags, differentiating between search for “tweets” and “people”, bringing lists into results and ranking tweets by popularity and relevance.

Is there a next step? Can Twitter start to market itself as a social search engine in its own right and make this profitable?

The clear edge that the social network has against mainstream search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo is that it can display realtime updates literally as an event is unfolding. Since the vast majority of its userbase arrive at the site with the intention of finding out what is happening right now, doesn’t it make sense to explore this avenue?

If you haven’t done so already, try using Twitter’s search page to find information you would otherwise look up on Google, to see how the results differ: