First off, if you haven’t seen Erik Qualman‘s Social Media Revolution video, it’s worth it just to get wowed for a few minutes. I’ve embedded his updated version at the end of this post.
One of the stats that particularly blew my mind is how YouTube has become the world’s second largest search engine. That was originally reported by TG Daily in October 2008, by digging through comScore‘s monthly “Expanded Search Query Report.”
And since Google owns YouTube, that seemed to give them a death grip on the market for Internet searches.
Until a little birdie came along.
Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, reported earlier this year that Twitter handles an astounding 19 billion searches per month worldwide. comScore hasn’t released worldwide stats on YouTube searches anywhere I’ve seen, but if you look at the proportion of YouTube searches to overall Google searches in the US (about 26%, according to their April “Expanded Search Query Report”), you could roughly estimate YouTube’s monthly searches at 22 billion.
And Twitter’s search volume is increasing rapidly. Sullivan hears from Twitter’s director of search Doug Cook, that Twitter expects to hit 1 billion searches per day in “the coming months.” That’d put them at about 30 billion per month.
What do you think? Does Twitter has a shot at surpassing Google itself someday? Do you you already use Twitter search more than Google? Or do you use the two for different purposes?
(Thanks to Lani’s foursuare pal and Twitter Handbook co-author Warren Whitlock for calling our attention to the Twitter search stats.)
And now, for the video. Folks on Facebook, here’s the direct link.
