Fast Times
Things are moving fast these days.
Only a few weeks ago (er, make that months), I wrote that major search engines were finding themselves ill-equipped to keep up with rapidly-emerging trends, while Twitter and other social networks were becoming good at this realtime reporting. I also thought that Twitter’s major business direction had been set straight for search given the focus on search throughout its website experience, and that they were bound to collide somehow.
After a long hot summer and into autumn I read that new deals with Twitter allow Bing and Google to include tweets in search results. Bing scores a second time through Microsoft’s stake in Facebook by also drawing in status updates from that community. These deals help solve for the search engines’ the problem of knowing what parts of the web are changing so that they can index significant changes almost immediately after they happen.
But this post isn’t really about what I got it right. Rather it’s about what parts I didn’t see coming, and what can be gleaned from that, which turns out to be more interesting.
