From Social Networks to Search Engines

Quite a major change happening in coming days - social networks are becoming search zones. This all started, with Twitter. People can access tweets (public ones) from other twitter users. This gave marketeers and web users a real time database to connect with like minded people.

Twitter brought in a really open kinda social networking structure, which was also a great place to Search. While much was written about twitter as a Search option, there was nothing official on it, until recently when twitter changed its homepage design. The new homepage design has the Search box as the most prominent feature.

Then Facebook brought more of its twitter-like modifications, where it opened up user's status updates, photos, videos for search. Facebook search as I previously mentioned is quite powerful cause at one glance the comments, feedback on the status updates can be seen. So it doubles up as a conversation tracker about a particular topic.

These networks can be better than Google for a real time Search, moreover Google cannot crawl Facebook or twitter updates (yet).

I personally find this pretty amazing, cause social networks first start as tools/places to connect with people. These connections become a database of info, which can be tapped into just like a Search Engine.

Will Google be affected by Facebook and Twitter Search? And we thought the competition was coming from Microsoft!

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