Twitter Pushes Search, New Homepage
It's finally here (you may have to log out to see the new homepage). As expect it's focused primarily on search & topics. It's good to see some real direction as many believe it's real-time search that will finally point Twitter towards some revenue and even Google thinks Twitter is winning at that game.
But in my opinion, there's still a major problem with Twitter search at the moment. It's certainly real-time and you can definitely get a good sense of current hot topics from it but if you're searching for broad terms the relevance often isn't there. So is it actually search or is it more Digg on steroids? Don't get me wrong, with some clever search queries you can get some amazingly insightful results (people to meet when you travel, current deals, city happenings) but most people won't do that and with 140 characters to choose from the query doesn't have as much chances to hit as say Google.
Twitter may need more relevance and depth and to achieve that start indexing deep into tweeted links and historical relationships between users (these guys always talk about football). Maybe we will see a "tweet score" which is connected to number of retweets and user popularity. This would mean an engine that is great at estimating what you're looking. All in real-time.
Some may say that this isn't what Twitter is good at. The real-time aspect of its content make it useful for specific searches. The issue here is that people don't use multiple search engines -- or at least very few do. People type in URLs into Google, I search Wikipedia or IMDb through Google. If they are contemplating doing "to Google what Google has done to others" they'll need search that gets you relevant as well as timely results. Otherwise they may as well just stick at only being "the pulse of the planet". How unambitious...
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