Google vs. Twitter

Google has been basically a household name for a while now. Twitter is relatively new, but it’s still become a pretty common word in today’s vocabulary. So, what’s the big deal with either one of them? Which one’s better…and why? It’s important to know that. If you’re going to do business on the Internet, or even if you’re going to maximize the time that you spend on it and get the most information for your effort, you have to know how to find what you need.

Most people automatically use Google, but that doesn’t necessarily give you the best results. There are other search engines available, some popular and some not-so-popular, that can provide you with results that might come out a bit differently than a Google search would — and you have the right to the most information possible.

Google

It’s hard to imagine that anything could come along and knock Google off of it’s throne. It seems so entrenched in the daily lives of people. They use it as a search engine, they use it for ads, they use it like a verb (I Googled him to see what I could find out, etc). Even people who don’t deal with the Internet very much at all know the word and what it basically means.

You can post a profile on Google, too, and you can tie almost everything you do into the search engine so that your toolbar, your email account, your revenue generation, and countless other things that you deal with every day are all in one place. When you search on Google you get hundreds or sometimes thousands of returns, based on what you searched for. They might be from a breaking news feed at the top of the page, but most of them come from Web pages that have been created and written some time ago. The information that you get through Google is usually pretty thorough, but it’s not always up-to-date and consistent.

Twitter

With Twitter, you get essentially the same thing as with Google — with one twist. Twitter is in real time, Google is not. If you’re interested in breaking news, a live event, or something else that’s taking place right that moment, you can find that information on Twitter, where it won’t show up in your Google search results.

Real-time search looks as though it will be the wave of the future because people are becoming more and more reliant on technology. they want to know things now, not a week or a day or even an hour after they happen.  Society is more global now, but it’s also more impatient. People have to stay up-to-date or they feel they won’t be relevant to their jobs and they won’t be able to take advantage of everything that life has to offer them.

So, What’s the Verdict? Who Wins?

Few things are more frustrating to Google users than not being able to get real-time information. Few things are more frustrating to Twitter users than not being able to get enough information that lets them know the historical significance or relevance of what they’re researching. With that in mind, both companies have ‘faults’ in their search engines and both need work.

Google is clearly the larger of the two and has the dominant position, but it only got there by knocking someone else out of the top spot. Twitter is looking for that spot, too, and it’s only a matter of time before it makes a move toward dethroning the king of the search engines.

Michi Beck is a YouCanSubmit writer. For more information on her, visit her Website.