Friend Luca Filigheddu launched tweefind.com, a twitter search site that uses “twitter rank” to select results.
Google had perhaps one of most amazing and simple ideas of the 20th century with Pagerank. Twitter, I think, represents one of the (few) real theats to Google. Google’s revenue requires “eyeballs” (exposure to their ads). Anything that steals eyeballs away from Google is not good for them. Twitter may do that and search is of course the most direct threat.
However, I think the reasons Twitter threatens Google is not in how it is the same, but in how it is different, in how Twitter has intrinsic advantages that Google cannot replicate with their “spider” model.
Tweefind tries to make Twitter more like Google and, therefore, it may actually be less disruptive. First, it takes away some of the real-time benefits of Twitter because Tweefind must “spider” the Twiter network to calculate its “twitter rank” – by that time Google has probably spidered enough sites to have just as much useful info as Twitter.
I already have a way to do a rank-based search with spider latency – it’s called Google. I don’t need another one. I already have a real time Twitter search in search.twitter.com – I’m not sure where that leaves Tweefind.com.
But you should check it out for yourself: see Luca’s Blog Post
It’s a Startup 2.0 candidate, so if you like it, vote for it.
Thanks for the post David! Actually Google uses a completely different approach. Rank on Google is related to “websites” not to a specific service. The number of parameters our algorithm uses to calculate the rank is strictly related to Twitter and to the way Twitter is used. Tweefind is gaining popularity in the past 48 hours and we are going to release other “extras” that we think will help this service to grow.
Ciao
Luca
Thanks Luca,
I understand that Tweetfind rankings use different metrics/algorithms than Google pagerank. But whether Tweetfind’s algorithms are different or not, does not change the fact that Tweetfind injects a ranking system, a Web 1.0 idea.