Will Search Make Twitter Money?
So, the other day, Twitter announced that their “Discovery Engine” is coming. That’s a fancy way of saying: “we’re putting a search box in your right hand nav”. So, after just three short years Twitter has realized that people like to search… Um, not sure what they’re thinking, maybe “slow and steady wins the race”???
Okay, great. Twitter is integrating their search tool more closely with the user experience. Cool. It’s a great tool. The real time search capabilities are fascinating to me, and something I plan on keeping an eye on. If you want to get a hands-on test of what I mean by real time search, go ahead and search Twitter and Google for your brand name (if you work for a smaller company that may not come up on Twitter, try your favorite sports team). Google gives you relevantly ranked listings for that term, Twitter gives you a snapshot of what’s happening right now. If you ran the same search in two weeks, not much would probably change on Google’s end, and nothing would be the same on Twitters side. Two fantastic tools, with two different purposes. The beauty here, is that as of right now Twitter doesn’t have any real competition in the real time search space (although I’m sure MySpace, Facebook, and Google’s mad scientists are all working on it…)
This new search integration raises what for me has been an age old (and by age old I mean six to 12 months) question though: Twitter, are you every going to monetize your search tool and dump in some paid listings?
I’m guessing yes, I mean the answer has to be “yes”, but it’s shocking that it’s taken this long to grab such proven, low hanging (and serious revenue generating) fruit, especially when one of they’re first attempts at monetizing their application is this.
