Twitter search vs. Google

A quick follow up note on my previous post on using Twitter for real-time search. Today the number one news story without doubt is the tragic death of the King of Pop – Michael Jackson. Nearly all major news outlets are reporting about his death and social media are buzzing like crazy about the icon. And once again we can see that Twitter is a much quicker search engine than Google Insights For Search which doesn’t display live results, only results for the last 7 days. See the difference below.

Top ten trending topics on Twitter this morning (9 AM CET):

Rip MJ
MJ’s
P Michael Jackson
Farrah Fawcett
#MichaelJackson
Iran
#iranelection
Pop
Thriller
MTV

Top ten search terms on Google the last 7 days:

1.neda
2.leighton meester
3. wimbledon 2009
4.wimbledon
5. jon and kate
6. 儿子
7. us open
8. us open golf
9. perez hilton
10. aöf

Both tools are great for research on current trends in online behaviour, and they are of course not analyzing the same activities. One monitors search behaviour and the other monitors published key words. Either way, when it comes to finding out what happens right now, Twitter search is way quicker.

Tags: , , , , , . Ping.

One thought on “Twitter search vs. Google”

  1. And Twitter search has come a long way since this original post as well. As the numbers show, people are flocking to Twitter search this year, at least for their real-time queries. As something of a niche Twitter search service ourselves, we’re finding that Twitter can be used as a real alternative to Google for getting answers to questions as well. For example, here’s a real-time stream of questions people are asking on Twitter right now: http://replyz.com/c And thousands of answers are posted on Twitter each day as well as you can see here: http://replyz.com/t/?replies=has_replies

Comments are closed.