I’m sure if you read TechCruch, you’re very aware of the fact that recently, Michael Arrington wrote a short post how he thought that we ought to think about Twitter more as a search engine. I’m going to tell you one distinct reason why Twitter is no where close to being a search engine.

Yes, Twitter does have a strong search component. But unless you’re “[…] searching for news,” or you are a “brand searching for feedback,” it seems that Twitter search doesn’t give the you (the user) any access to specific tweets that are really “about” a subject.

My favorite example of this is the Twitter search for PHP. In my experience, it turns out that searching for tweets about PHP will yield more tweets with full length URLs ending in “.php” than tweets specifically about web development. Since there really isn’t any way to filter results by any sort of vertical like subject or category then how is Twitter search ever going to give me relevant news and opinions about my favorite web development programming language without a shit ton of noise from full URL links? (Ruby and HTML also suffer from this problem.)

So, Twitter search might have a really unique and powerful information view when it comes to breaking events or unique brand mentions. But it seems that more general subjects are a lost cause in Twitter search. And when you look at Internet search, it doesn’t seem like breaking news is the only thing people are searching for.