In the war search engines are leading against social media, it all looks like the latter is winning. Real-time trends are so important that Bing has incorporated them into its search suggestions. Since Google is pretty much doing the same, then it isn’t just a way for one engine to compete against another. It is more a technology competing against another.

Apparent contradiction

My view is that the social media is a disruptive alternative to search engines. There is something that social media does that search engines cannot do but for which both are competing: the transfer of knowledge. Search engines are about retrieving information and knowledge is transferred once the person has 1) found the right keyword, 2) found useful webpage and 3) read and understood the webpage. Social media on the other hand transfers knowledge from one user to another as they interact. Therefore, social media has nothing else to offer that the possibility for people to interact. As a result, indexing the content of social media seems at first sight to be useless.

Why this move from software giants?

What Microsoft and Google are trying to do is take advantage of the fact that social media generate content to have bigger indexes. Don’t forget, search engines without websites to index are like a social network without users. What they hope by indexing social networks is to keep trace of a conversation between two users and hope to extract information that can later be useful to others who would be in the same ‘cognitive state’ than those who initially had that conversation.