On Friday night, I stumbled across John Borthwick’s post titled Creative Destruction…Google Slayed By The Notificator? via Fred Wilson’s blog. I must say I totally enjoyed it, and John did a wonderful job of articulating the concept of creative destruction with some great examples.
….I now see search as fragmenting and Twitter search doing to Google what broadband did to AOL.
Google seems to be the most successful company (in terms of the amount of time its been on the top) and it is most likely to be a victim of creative destruction than anyone else …perhaps. I agree with this, but I think the theory around Twitter being the innovation to unseat Google Search and its reasons did not seem convincing, and I thought I’d share some thoughts.
- The NOW web is not just on twitter. In fact there is a much much larger NOW web happening on millions of forums, email lists, blog comments and message boards around the web. They are as active as twitter and have a wealth of information being added every minute, similar to twitter. I know that from a recent example where I found out about the US Air plane landing in the Hudson river on twitter, while my wife found out about it on a baby forum that she reads regularly and she may have found out only a few hours after me, or perhaps sooner. These are real time conversations happening NOW which are not on twitter. So I believe the NOW web is much larger than just twitter and in fact it may take a really long time for the rest of the NOW web to discover and adopt/switch to twitter, if at all they do. I don’t see a reason for this to happen. And guess what, Google has all the forums and other conversation destinations in their index.
- Yes, I know what you are thinking. Google has indexed all these forums (and other such destinations that have real time conversations) but they don’t have the real real time data indexed in real time. That is true and Google will definitely have to come up with a solution to index this real time data in real time or almost real time, but when and if it does that twitter will be a small fraction of the real time data. Twitter may still have the real real time data surface faster than Google, lets assume, but what percentage of conversation data on twitter is something that you want exactly when it happens, besides breaking news updates? Almost all of the rest can be consumed a few minutes or hours or days later too. So Google’s solution will be pretty good.
- Google may not have to do a now.google.com but just add a time-based slicing of results on their current search results listing like Now, 24 hours, 3 days, 7 days and All time. In fact, this is something we have tried with an experiment here at BetterLabs, where we created a bargains site based on RSS feeds and made a decision to show all browse and search results by time as bargains data has a defined shelf life. You can see an example here. Google will not cannibalize Google.com by adding a timeline and in fact may create a greater value for search users to see the time-based results. I am sure this is not an easy problem to solve but may not be more difficult than what they have solved already. So when they solve/address this problem/need, Google.com will become still more valuable and it will deliver a lot more of the NOW web that twitter will or can because twitter has only its own data to show and not of the rest of the NOW web.
- I am not sure if the YouTube and video search comparison is valid as video is a completely different media format, where as NOW web or real time conversation is still text data that we read, similar to the historical web. So a regular Google user will seamlessly access the new NOW web results that Google surfaces and I am not sure I see any difference in experience in doing so.
- When Google does add the time-based NOW web search, it will be able to surface a lot more trends that are happening right now on forums and other conversation destinations. For example, recently there was a conversation on one of the forums about the possibility of High Fructose Corn Syrup containing products having traces of mercury which is bad for health. This is just one of the valuable conversational findings Google could surface amongst millions and Google has better access to this data today than anyone else. This is no different than a trending topic within just the twitter ecosystem.
I am a big believer of the NOW web and the concept of FUTURE search. Twitter has seen tremendous adoption in the last 12 months, but I think Google is still the most ingrained HABIT as far as information search is concerned and it might just be able to add real time information in its offering before its too late, especially since no one else has access to as much real time NOW web as Google does. That doesn’t mean that Google won’t be a victim of Creative Destruction, but in my opinion it won’t be a victim of Twitter. More conversation on this on Hacker News here.
Update #1: @lewmoorman presents an interesting perspective on why Twitter may indeed be a significant force against Google here. Also there is a lot of commentary on the Alley Insider post as well.
Update #2: Kara @ AllThingsD seems to agree as well and you can read her thoughts here.
February 9th, 2009 at 6:18 am
Grerat post. Totally agree with “The NOW web is not just on twitter” – and there are other interesting companies mining this stuff too, eg Backtype etc
February 9th, 2009 at 11:46 am
[...] response, Vaibhav thinks that Google can be more adaptable than that; Twitter is hardly the entire NOW web and Google [...]
February 9th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
I have to agree with you. Although Twitter seems to have tremendous potential, it doesn't appear to have a specific business goal as of this point. Even now I hear a lot of web savvy people looking at it and saying huh?
February 9th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Perhaps the reason so many are hoping for a Google-killer is because one is so badly needed. Many online businesses get such a huge percentage of their sales from Google that Google can literally put them out of business any time they wish – or any time their system hiccups – whichever comes first.
None of the Social Networking sites have recognized the obvious: that targeted advertising is the Monetization Golden Goose they're missing. I've blogged about it several times and suggested it publicly online to Twitter and FriendFeed – with no response so far.
I'd love to hear your input on what I've posted. If you'd like direct links let me know and I'll send or post them. Or just search GrowMap.com for monetization and see the first and last posts returned.
February 11th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
[...] by Jason Fleck @ February 11th, 2009 Some say Twitter will take down Google and others say Google owns the NOW web. Who’s right? In my opinion, [...]
February 13th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Agree. Twitter as Google killer is more hope than conviction. Despite it's tremendous popularity, Twitter's reach is still very small when compared to Google. Google meanwhile has lots of time to make improvements if it sees a market there. Google News results in google search is a step in that direction.
February 18th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
[...] It should be mentioned that this use of the term, NOW Web, is much bigger than that suggested by Vaibhav Domkundwar. The concepts are very much related, but this bigger use may suggest [...]
February 18th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
[...] on this seem to be mixed. Vaibhav Domkundwar comes out flatly and says that Google Will Not Be A Victim Of Twitter and Believes Borthwick’s Theory Is Flawed. He bases this principally on the argument that Twitter covers only a fraction of what he [...]
March 5th, 2009 at 5:03 am
yaa i agree with you neither it is on twitter nor its mobile web
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The University of British Columbia in Canada
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