Google’s domination is being eroded by new search approaches worldwide. The shift has been caused by the new powers of social media websites, from social bookmarking sites to social networking websites like Twitter.

If you now search social bookmarking websites for a topic, you can actually find better content on these sites than from the search engines. I just signed up to stumbleupon.com. Through this bookmarking site I discovered some fantastic websites in my area of interest. So why is the content on the top bookmarking websites so good? Because it is user driven and not algorithm based. If you search for ‘article writing’, for example, the results given to you are the best as voted by the websites users – and not what Google deems to be the most relevant.

Top Social Bookmarking Websites to find quality information

Delicious

Stumbleupon

Digg

Will Twitter be a rival to Google?

Twitter is REAL TIME – allowing you to read the latest articles instantly as they are posted by users. These articles/posts take time to get indexed by Google and appear in the results pages. So if you want the latest content in your niche, Twitter is the place to be.

How do you find information on Twitter? Go to Twitter Search and type something, you can also use tag search e.g. #Domains. You then need to click on some of the url links people have tweeted (posted). To see trending topics you can go to Twitscoop, the website shows you the latest words/topics being discussed by the millions of Twitter users. If you follow the right people in your niche, you will automatically find great articles and blogs as the people you follow tweet fresh new content.

Twitter’s search function currently only produces results by time. New functionality will soon be added to this to allow better search. They are currently testing their “discovery engine” with a few users, this could be the true making of Twitter.

What is wrong with Google?

The problem with Google is the results are often outdated. Their algorithm generally dictates that older pages have higher PageRank and get ranked better in the results pages. This is a major problem if you are looking for up-to- the-minute information. I just searched for ‘advanced seo techniques’ - many of the top pages are from 2006/2007. These are not relevant to me in such a quickly evolving area.

In conclusion, I believe web 2.0 websites are having a much greater impact on Google’s domination in search. So go ahead and sign up to some of these social media websites and give them a try...

Written and distributed by Search Marketing UK.