It has been a banner year for social media. We can all pat ourselves on the back knowing that we generated an obscene amount of tweets, status updates, comments on status updates, event pages, we got totally linked in and really explored the boundaries of what we could do with this thing. And we’ve made all sorts of social media predictions for 2010 based on the upwards trend and all of which (every single last one) will come true because we know exactly what is going on without a doubt; we have absolute surety…except for one thing maybe.

Social media may be getting in the way of your search results. Bots (and most humans) tend to think that what’s newest is best. In reality exactly what you’re looking for is what’s best, while many times being duped by the top ranked results on a page has been coined “Google gullibility“. I search the internet for a living (I use RSS feeds and I have subscriptions but I still go out digging in the dirt for exactly what I’m looking for) and I can say honestly that a lot of my searches place me square in the middle of some pedantic conversations that have nothing to do with what I’m looking for except that a keyword appears in the text.

Twitter feeds appearing in Google and  and Bing represent to me a cluttering of search engine space. It’s about quality, when people have mistakenly accepted that it’s about quantity. Because of this I search mostly news sites now, which unfortunately bypasses a lot of otherwise awesome things that might appear in a regular search.  But this may only be a temporary traffic problem, the highway might clear up again in the very near future. Right now it’s about real time search, in the very near future it will be about semantic search engines.

For more information on those go here. For more information about what the people in the photo above are laughing at go here.

Related posts:

1. Why Social Media is the New Search
2. Social media saves lives
3. Google social media make Murdoch angry, Murdoch smash Google!

Tags: Google gullibility, here, real time search, search results, semantic search engines, Social Media, social media predictions for 2010

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