Online search is a splintering market, and social networking appears to be a big reason why.
Three billion searches are conducted each month on You Tube and a billion are launched on Facebook. Twitter is getting its share.
So how is a traditional search engine going to remain relevant? Search engines are spending a great deal of effort better understanding the intent of searchers and figuring out how to deliver better results.
People search for events on Twitter and for people on Facebook, says Hitwise's Heather Dougherty
All things equal, they probably produce the best results.
But social sites are having success in special niches. For instance, a lot of Facebook searches are for people, according to Heather Dougherty, direct of research at Hitwise. This would make sense since it a network connecting people.
LinkedIn attracts business searches and Twitter sees “a lot of event-driven searches and people-driven searches,” Dougherty said Tuesday at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose.
The Iran election was one such event. “Real-time search will have a strong impact,” she said.
In this changing environment, searchers engines better keep looking over their shoulders. Users could find they turn elsewhere depending on the information they seek.
