The Google/Twitter Search-off

I'll admit that my perspective of Twitter might be a bit narrow. I immediately thought that this was a great service for businesses to market to their clients, authors and artists to communicate with their fans and also an interesting way to get word-of-mouth news (a facet of Twitter that emerged during June's Iranian election fracas).

But a recent blog by economist Tyler Cowen has me rethinking Twitter. Cowen makes an interesting case for Twitter as research tool/search engine.

  Here's how Cowen puts it:

Google is wonderful but it's hard to sort through the mess and figure out where the conversation is now.  For sampling opinion on either movies or music, Twitter is essential, or even for researching a forthcoming blog post.  Think of it as Google focused on one time-slice and giving the weight of crowd opinion no more than linear force.  If an opinion is more common it will receive more tweets but otherwise your search brings up the splat, ordered by chronology, and thus it is more idiosyncratic than the first Google search page and often in a good way.

As an editor, anything that helps me understand my audience better I'm all for. So I tested Twitter's ability at gauging crowd opinion vs. the results of a Google search. The test topic was the H1N1 flu.

First, the Google search for "H1N1" was what you would expect. The first hit was the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) official H1N1 flu site and one of the top hits was the more general CDC flu.gov site. Other sites towards the top of the page were the World Health Organization (WHO), Wikipedia's H1N1 page and the Google news feed for stories about swine flu. All very helpful if I'm looking for background and reliable information on H1N1.

Now the Twitter results. I pulled up the 20 most recent Tweets that were tagged "H1N1." Sure enough, the result was as advertised by Cowen. Imagine listening in on a crowd of 20 people all talking at the same time about swine flu: There were four tweets updating death tolls from four different countries, three tweets linking to an LA Times story about flu shots being shipped, another three linking to a vaccination concipiracy theory or advocating to abstain from flu shots completely, two were in French and one was from a mother who was in a waiting room with her H1N1 infected son.

Now if I was writing a story on the H1N1 flu, Twitter wouldn't be a great primary source. But let's say research for a story had me talking to a physician, reading the latest from major news outlets and checking out information from the CDC or WHO. Basically the Google route. If I were to just take this route, I'd have no idea that there was a decent sampling of people who were really apprehensive (tracking death tolls) or extremely (emphasis on extreme) skeptical of the official line on the H1N1 flu.

So here's what I've learned from this brief exercise, if you need to dig up a realiable source (read government agency, news outlet, university) Google is still your best bet. But if you need to conduct a "man on the street" style interview? Twitter is making that style of information gathering easier than ever.

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[Gunpowder Tea]

I am using the Google/Twitter. By using this service I can communicate with my clients and relatives.