I was wondering why no-one seemed to give a twinglebook about the fact that Microsoft struck search deals with Twitter and Facebook, and that Google not only has their own deal with Twitter, but plans to launch their own “Social Search” in the near future. Then I remembered that the average person doesn’t know their Firefox from a hole in the ground (YouTube link, video is also below). Well, I have to admit that I care; depending on how both Microsoft and Google choose to integrate real-time search results from social networking sites, this could either be really interesting, or really annoying and/or paranoia-inducing. More so the annoying part; ever since SEO became a parasitic, opportunistic business instead of an integrated part of web site development, search results have become less and less useful on a steady downward curve. The beauty of Twitter Search is its real-time results; the ugly downside is that all those results are spam-infested Tweets! Who cares how fast you can search multi-level marketer’s tweets (see Will the Twitter Firehose Become a Sewage-Filled Spam Hose) ? In my opinion, the only real value of these relationships the two search giants are building with Twitter would be real-time search of everything but Twitter noise. Hopefully they’ll pursue that, but Bing’s beta version of Twitter search appears to be just, well, Twitter search. How mixing this stuff in with regular results is going to benefit anyone is beyond me. These moves also come at an odd time, when both Facebook and Twitter’s growth are flattening out. And the paranoia mentioned earlier? Google’s Social Search will require you to be logged in with a Google Profile, and will connect additional search results via your existing “friends” on various social networking services, thereby tracking all your searches and connecting them with people you know. But perhaps I fret about this sort of thing too much. After all, Googoo has a excewent pwivacy powicy.

Google asks New Yorkers to tell us the difference between a search engine and a browser: