Social Search – The Future of Twitter?

Many social media pundits have suggested that the “killer app” for the future of social networks – in particular Twitter – isn’t chat but search. That sounds strange when you first hear the idea, Twitter is hardly a Google killer. However it makes more sense when you realise that the two address different needs. In this post I’ll share some thoughts on possible uses of social search and how it can add value missing from traditional search engines.

What Is Social Search?

Mining the Zeitgeist

There are two basic forms of social search. The first and most obvious is simply to search the public posts for your target term. For example you might go to the Twitter search page and type in a few keywords or a hashtag.

This type of search rarely works well for most traditional queries. Type What is oil into Twitter search and you’ll find lots of interesting stuff – but probably not the simple definition that appears at the top of the same search on Google. For this sort of research Twitter is a fail.

The value of this sort of wide search is not so much to individuals but to businesses, PR people, writers etc looking to get a feel for public opinion. The Twitter stream is a great resource for monitoring sentiment, trends, brand reputation, and more. There are already some tools appearing for this purpose such as Twendz and Twitalyzer Brand.

Open social networks like Twitter provide a huge pool of public opinion with massive potential for market research – and it’s free to mine! Personally I expect Twitter analytics to be a significant growth area in the near future.

Subjective Search

For individuals the real power of social search is not so much for objective, factual questions as for subjective matters of opinion. Do a twitter search for best baby oil and you’ll get lots of interesting suggestions.

One drawback of this is that you don’t know how reliable these Tweets are. Are they PR puffs from the companies concerned? Are the products available in your country? Are they safe?

This is where real-time social search comes into its own. You already have a network of people you know and hopefully trust. So ask them directly! Just post a tweet saying “What’s the best baby oil available in the UK?” and wait for your followers to reply. The results will be opinions but with a built in authority factor based on your knowledge of the person. The larger your network, the more likely you are to get a useful answer.

In the current climate another perfect application for this sort of search is job-hunting, asking your contacts to keep you informed of any relevant work they may hear about

Of course Twitter isn’t the only way to do this sort of “narrow search”. Some argue that social searching is powerful but best removed from the clutter of general chat, hence there are specialised social Q&A systems such as Aardvark. This has smart features for routing questions to people in your extended network who are experts in the relevant field. Aardvark works really well, however I fear it might suffer due to user laziness – it’s yet another network to join and understand.

What Will Google Do?

An interesting question is how Google will react to these new forms of search. There have been rumours flying for a while now that Google want to buy Twitter. Both parties seem keen to downplay the possibility in public, but this could just be a negotiating tactic.

My personal feeling is that “sentiment search” would fit well as an extra dimension on top of the existing Google features, especially with an option to search either just your own network or the wider Twitterverse. It would allow Google to harness the wisdom of the crowd.

The smart people at Google will certainly have thought of this, I suspect the only question is whether or not the price is right.