Twitter Search Now Gaining on Google

Twitter’s role is constantly being shaped by its users. Since its launch, the service has gone from a SMS blogging app to ‘information network.’ These days, Twitter is as much about spreading hot news as it is about socializing. One proof of that is the rapidly growing number of searches done on the site. Twitter says there are about 800 million searches every day now, a huge metric by any measure.

At the Aspen Ideas Festival, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone announced that the site is now seeing 800 million queries every day. That adds up to 24 billion queries per month. To put this in perspective, that’s about as much as Bing and Yahoo put together. And it’s becoming comparable with what Google typically sees, Twitter search volume would now be at about 27 percent of Google’s, Search Engine Land claims.

What’s even more impressive is that the Twitter stats are actually on the rise and are seeing a very solid growth. The last time the site bragged about search, at the Twitter Chirp developer conference in April, it was getting some 600 million searches every day. That’s a 33 percent growth in just a few months.

However, it must be noted that Google searches versus Twitter searches is not an apples to apples comparison. People use the two search engines very differently and few users would put them in the same category. Users initiate every Google search and use the search engine actively when they’re looking for something.

Twitter searches mostly happen through the APIs and not on the site. In fact, Twitter’s search feature has been one of the site’s weak spots to date. Traffic from mobile and desktop applications makes up most of the search volume for Twitter. This is because many applications enable users to have constantly running, passive searches that get refreshed every few seconds.