Web mogul Google announced Wednesday that its upcoming partnership with social networking giant Twitter will allow Google searchers to see tweets related to their search topics in the list of results. The Google blog referred to the tweets as valuable real-time observations for the searched topic. But as the world gets seemingly smaller and smaller thanks to an ever-increasing obsession with self-expression through social networking sites, will Google searches end up more muddled than enhanced, now causing users to not only sift through obnoxious ads and spam but not also random insights tweeted about by perfect strangers?
Google’s blog announced the partnership with enthusiasm, as if it were opening up a whole new service to users of the online search engine. But it seems more like a way for Twitter to get more hits ‘- and therefore, more money ‘- and a way for Google to control yet another wildly popular avenue of the Internet. As for the users, exactly how useful will this development be for them? Google searches are used to seek fact or reliable sources to answer some kind of inquiry, whether the pursuit be academically, business, or curiosity-motivated. Peoples’ tweets mentioning a particular term searched in Google likely won’t help the searcher, and will only clutter an already-overstimulated interface.
The integration could be well received if the Twitter results have a show/hide option by which users can choose to allow or block these types of results. Or, if Google established a Google-powered search engine on the Twitter website, people can search through Twitter whenever they need to ‘- for whatever reason they’d need to ‘- and they will receive far more thorough results to their searches than the current Twitter search option. Otherwise, tweets showing up in regular Google search results will corroborate critics’ accusations that Americans, especially the college-aged and 20-something generation ‘- are too wired to the social networking sphere and too out of touch with reality.
Depending on Twitter for ‘Balloon Boy’ cracks and keeping in touch with what ones’ friends are doing during the weekend is the lighter side, but putting these not-at-all-credible sources of information into Google searches, and possibly using them as legitimate reference points, is going too far. Google has integrated the web to a point where fact is inseparable from fiction, ads coalesce with original content and opinions and rumor are presented on the same pages as credible resources. And with search engine users being subjected to this kind of bombardment of useless information, Google will be held responsible for fostering a generation of very connected but very mindless Americans.
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