Though Googling “Cornell” will return - sure enough - www.cornell.edu as the first result, the PageRank algorithm has limitations that may be better overcome by networks that are more akin to social instead of information networks. A Search Engine Watch blog post, Is Twitter the New Google Alternative?, describes how people are increasingly turning to Twitter for information that isn’t easily retrieved through search engines. Though Twitter is designed as a “social networking and micro-blogging service” (Wikipedia) which lets people post short updates on their profile pages, it turns out that Twitter is also functioning as a tool for many to pose questions and get answers. According to the article, some are using it for business purposes to get advice on company and site improvements. Lisa Bledsoe, one person who uses Twitter in this way, states in the article:

“Because I deliberately cultivated a Twitter community of my industry peers, I knew they could give me the answer quickly. I can also ‘refine’ my ’search’ on Twitter because I’m talking to actual people, as opposed to posing questions to an algorithm.”

As discussed in class, the process of ranking search results suffers from problems such as multiple ways to say the same things, multiple meanings for the same term, differing authoring styles, differing intents behind queries, and the overall abundance of possibly relevant (and possibly irrelevant) information. However, questions posed over social networking sites are able to eliminate some of these problems. If a person fully types out a question with grammatical context (as opposed to keywords), other human readers will likely be able to correctly interpret the questioner’s meanings and intent. Furthermore, by taking advantage of focal closure to network with other experts in the same business, people like Bledsoe reduce the chance that illegitimate authors (children, conspiracy theorists, etc.) will respond to their queries. Though waiting for answers usually takes longer than a fraction of a second, social networking sites like Twitter offer the advantage of human interaction, a big plus over search engines in some cases.

Unsurprisingly, the popularity of answer sites is also increasing for likely the same reasons. According to the Search Engine Watch blog post What a Searcher Wants: Answers, “the US market share of Q&A site traffic grew a whopping 118% last year.” Just browsing some open questions on Yahoo! Answers, it’s clear why some questions (e.g. Best time during start-up to seek venture capital and timetable for getting money?) are more effectively posed on this sort of site instead of typed as keywords into a search engine. Very specific questions that nonetheless involve lots of common keywords would be less likely to turn up helpful results using a search engine. Of course, open questions on Yahoo! Answers may be answered by just about anyone, but the idea that other people may directly serve as better sources of information than web pages nonetheless persists.

Still, it wouldn’t do to disregard the obvious benefits of search engines. It’s much more efficient to Google “Cornell” for the university homepage instead of contacting peers on Twitter. As Bledsoe concedes:

“Searching for the right information isn’t necessarily an ‘either/or’ situation (either I use either Google or Twitter), it’s sometimes a ‘both/and.’