Twitter Search?

I think the current meme that Twitter will kill Google started with this article Google next victim of creative destruction. Now, I'm seeing all sorts of articles in my news feeds about Twitter vs Google.

It's overblown. Borthwick's article focused on twitter's real-time search capabilities, and the fact that Google doesn't have an equivalent - this is an accurate assessment. But Google does better on things people don't necessarily tweet about. As an experiment, I decided to see which search engine could give me better results for my research topic. Compare the search results I get for "chinese tone assessment for call":

Twitter Search Results

Google Scholar Search Results

Google Search Results

As of now, Twitter search has nothing. Google Scholar, on the other hand, has 46,600 results. Regular Google search has about 2,170,000. Which one is more useful for my research purposes?

That's not to say that Twitter search is useless, I just think it occupies a complementary space relative to Google. There are certain information needs that Twitter doesn't fulfill that Google does. And vice-versa.

One way this could change is if I start tweeting my research activities, and other researchers tweet their research, and so and so forth. This would be interesting to try for a bit.