Recently, a couple of tech industry types have suggested that Twitter isn't a microblogging site, but is a search engine. Huh? And they're being serious. So the next time you're looking for a website that sells computer parts, or a video to show you how to make fishing lures, I guess all you need to do is search Twitter.
Let's think about this for a second. CNN is a news site, I'm sure we can agree on that. But wait... all of the content on the site, both articles and videos, can be searched. So doesn't that make it a search engine, rather than a news site? Hardly. The only thing it means is their content is searchable, which is no different than any other site with lots of content. Hundreds of thousands of sites have a search feature. Likewise, the fact that I can search for "skateboarding" videos on YouTube, or "hockey" news on my local newspaper site doesn't make them search engines. All it means is the webmaster was smart enough to put a search box on the site so people can find what they came for.
If I need to know what time a movie starts downtown tonight, I'll want to find the movie theater website. Which means I'll do a search on Yahoo or Google and find it in 15 seconds. Alternately, I could search Yahoo or Google for a mortgage calculator, or pictures of David Letterman, or information about turtles, or anything else I could possibly think of. What kind of idiot would search for those things on Twitter? The results, if any, would be nothing more than telling you who recently said the word "turtle" in a message. Wow, that's some search engine.
Twitter lets people post comments and communications. And it happens to have an internal search tool, the same as any other site. It isn't a search engine.
Google/Yahoo/Bing/Ask will search the entire landscape of the internet with the sole purpose of finding what you've asked for. Articles, pictures, videos, whatever. Which is why they are called search engines.
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