Twitter vs. Google: Which Gets You Better Info, Really?

by Katjusa Cisar

It’s painfully quaint now, but there was a time in the not-too-distant past when using “google” as a verb sounded strange and people sheepishly chuckled about “googling” themselves. Now we have a staggering number of ways to suss information out of the “World Wide Web,” to stalk and to share knowledge (or kittehs and double rainbows, whatever). Last week, Facebook widened the possibilities even more when it started rolling out a feature that allows a Facebooker to draw on the site’s more than 150 million other users for answers to questions. Facebook Questions gives users options to run a poll, to tag questions in categories or sign up for alerts when new answers pop up. For the past month, I’ve been testing the limits of Facebook Questions’ basic premise: the fusion of social network and information hub.

But not on Facebook-I got off Facebook last year when I realized my willpower was no match against the lure of mindlessly clicking through the vacation photos of the ex-girlfriend of a guy I was in Algebra class with 15 years ago. Not even Facebook Questions can win me back.

Still, I’m not convinced that a Google search, swayed as it is by SEO manipulations and popularity, is the superior source of information. Twitter, my social network of choice, is populated by real people (mostly real, anyway) who understand nuance, have preferences based on emotion not statistics, and can explain instead of regurgitate. I’ve got about 670 Twitter followers, and minus the homeowner’s insurance companies, Holiday Inns and follow-happy “social media gurus” among them, it’s still an opinionated and smart bunch of twits.

At first I thought I’d google nothing I didn’t also tweet. But this proved to be seriously inconvenient: Google is clearly better at finding addresses, spellchecking names and doing work-related searches I need to keep private. (Lest we forget, asking for information on the Internet is just a way of giving it to dataminers.) For a couple of days, however, I forced myself to find addresses on a paper-and-ink map and look up numbers in the phone book. Heaven knows I have enough phone books lying around-AT&T; unloads them by the bagful in our apartment complex.

It turns out the old-school method is not that much more time-consuming than firing up my laptop and googling. Also, while thumbing through the Yellow Pages to find a music venue in Atlanta called The Tabernacle, I discovered the awesomely-titled Tabernacle of Joy Miracle Deliverance Center.

So, is Google or my Twitter followership a smarter culler of information? Following are some of the queries from my (very unscientific) Twitter vs. Google experiment.

Tweet: “Would it be gauche to wear my Foxy Shazam T-shirt to a Foxy Shazam show? Is there an unspoken rule on concert attire?”
Result: This elicited more responses than any other question I’ve ever asked of Twitter. “I’ve been told that wearing the band’s shirt to the show is ABSOLUTELY not a done thing. So wear the tee & a button if you have one,” wrote one. The responses poured in: “I’ve never understood that rule,” “Why not fly the colors?” “as long as you wear it ironically,” “Obscure side project T-shirt works, too.” A mom tweeted, “The band won’t notice… and the fans won’t care. And if they do care, you’re cooler than them anyway. Wow, do I sound like a mom much?!” Only one person cautioned me not to wear the shirt (“Don’t be that girl”).

Google Search: “rule for wearing band t-shirts at concerts”
Result: In .29 seconds, Google brought up 449,000 sites-including one convoluted eHow article (a 10-step process!) and mostly humorless scenester blogs and message board discussions from 2002.

Verdict: Twitter. Google gave me information overload, while the twits gave me attitude and a personalized pep talk. (OK, so I was just looking for excuses to wear my shirt.) As it turned out, lots of people wore Shazam shirts at the show, and at least two girls wore fake mustaches in honor of the lead singer’s own flamboyant ‘stache.

Tweet: “Anyone have that Vanity Fair profile of Courtney Love from ‘92? Curious to read it now after seeing her just barely make it through a show.”
Result: Minutes later, someone responded “Here you go! http://ow.ly/25PUN”

Google Search: “lynn hirschberg courtney love”
Result: Oh look at that, first result! Hrmm.

Verdict: OK, so maybe it was dumb to ask. But someone got to feel special and useful by providing me with an already-tiny, ready-to-retweet URL! So, I’m going with Twitter on this one.

Tweet: “Gross, yes, but I need folk remedies (no insurance): how do I drain the ugly plugged duct on my eyelid? It’s been there at least 6 months. …Eye doc says expensive surgery or hot compresses. Compresses don’t make the damn thing budge. So… #askingyoubeforeWebMDorGoogle”
Result: One reply. “Rub the white part of a potato on it. Seriously, it’s an Amish folk trick.”

Google Search: “clogged tear duct remedies,” “lump on eyelid”
Result: Through a series of alarming photo searches, I determined that what I actually have is a “chalazion,” not a plugged tear duct. Yeah, maybe that’s what the doctor called it. But all of the remedies seem to be along the lines of hot compresses and waiting it out. Sigh.

Verdict: Nobody wins. All I get from rubbing my eyelid with raw potato is an achy eye and dried starch crust on my cheek.

Tweet: Any Quakers/former Quakers out there? How do you answer the question, “What is Quakerism?”
Result: Two replies, “I’m eating their oatmeal right now, does that help?” and “Don’t know about Quakers but I am a Quacker. Which is what we aficionados of The Mighty Ducks trilogy-cycle call ourselves.”

Google Search: “what is quakerism?”
Result: Websites with relevant, non-goofy answers.

Verdict: Google. What you need, when you need it!

A friend did some testing of her own for this one:

Tweet: “Twitter! Help! I’m having a brain freeze today what’s an antonym for ‘jargon’?”
Results: Within a minute or two: Lay[man’s] terms, colloquialism, lingua franca, and “Antonym for ‘jargon’ = ‘English’ ;-)”

Google Search: “Antonym for jargon” and “jargon”
Results: Useless entries from Answers.com, websites of computer jargon, the entomology, uh, etymology of the word. Even Merriam-Webster wasn’t much help, plus it was full of blinking, slow-to-load ads.

Verdict: Twitter.

Tweet: “Anybody got some cheap skincare suggestions? I’m talking cucumber slices, that kind of thing. I can’t afford $27.99 for .25 oz. of eye gel.”
Result: Along with a few jokes (“just stop aging”), I got a recommendation for the 1988 book “Cheaper and Better: Homemade Alternatives to Storebought Goods” and another for honey-”Just plain old honey! I think any kind is fine. Leave it for at least five minutes, but I think the longer the better.”

Google Search: “cheap skincare”
Result: Ignored the eHow and About.com articles and zeroed in on this gem, “Really Cheap Skin Care Stuff…And a Cat.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3LTADHD4SI

This woman justifies YouTube…. which is, yes, a subsidiary of Google.

Verdict: Toss-up. I doubt I would have found the book without the tweeted suggestion, but I wouldn’t have found that video without Google. (It never occurred to me to search YouTube for skin care advice, but I now I know better.)

Tweet: OK, hive mind, where are your porn recommendations?
Result: Twenty-six minutes of silence. Not even a pornbot follow. (Where are they when you really need them?) Then, a couple of replies, both incredulous (“Seriously? Dare I ask what for?”) and joking (“I read it for the articles”). When I tweeted again encouraging Direct Messages, well, they didn’t flood in. But I was surprised at how many people did open up, some of them people I’ve only met once or know only via Twitter. My favorite: “I can’t resist a poll (ahem) that I can respond to, even if the wife would rather I couldn’t. The Hun: diverse & free. Asian Thumbs: duh.”

Google Search: “porn”
Result: Porn Hub, Wanker Hut, Bang You Later, PenisBot. The most popular, I suppose? At the bottom of the page is a search result from “my social circle” (as defined by Google via my Gmail). It was a link to a February 2009 blog about “Super Bowl porn,” written by a friend of a friend of a friend. Google found porn for me by piecing together Gmail and Gchat data, and ironically, that weirds me out more than divulging my query to the world on Twitter. More on that later.

Verdict: Twitter. Mining Twitter for porn suggestions was partly a stunt, partly serious. I’m not well-versed in Internet pornography, but I am genuinely curious. I assumed that asking about porn would be so outrageous that I’d only get nervous jokes in response. But social media and networking are quickly eroding private vs. public life and changing how we define “stranger” (friend of a friend of a friend) and “acquaintance” (someone I know only via Twitter but trust more). Not that this is a new observation, but, man, it really crystallized when I found out the preferred masturbatory aide of people I hardly know.

Final verdict? It depends. The biggest surprise for me is how much people love answering questions on Twitter. (I tried the Twitter question aggregator TwitQA, by the way, but it didn’t generate much response. Don’t bother.) Google’s computer mind is super-quick and usually precise, but the danger in its algorithm is that it occasionally panders to ad-choked sites or generic information (eHow articles). Google’s attempt to make search results more relevant by bringing in data from a social circle of direct and secondary “connections” still feels clunky and invasive.

There’s something else you should know about Google. If you have Gmail, you see everything you’ve ever googled (click on More and then Even More at the top left sidebar of Gmail, then page down and click on Web History). Since I opened a Gmail account in the Spring of 2007, I’ve apparently searched 14,693 terms. On June 6, 2007 at 10:29 a.m. I searched for “random stuff to do,” for example. At 10:34, for “salacious.” Two weeks later, I was searching for “conjugated linoleic acid,” “benefits of trans fats,” my soon-to-be (now ex-) boyfriend, and his circa-1984 high school punk band, Juvenile Truth. Reading my search history is like reading a diary.

Google also examines trends in searching. On average, I Google the most between 12 and 1 p.m., on Mondays, and during the month of June. And my most searched term? Why, it’s me. Some things never change.

Katjusa Cisar is a freelance writer living in Atlanta.