Will Niched Content, Support In Social Networks Impact Search

I have been working on a site that is geared towards helping people find all car specials and rebates available by location. The site uses a combination of on site actions and GeoIP recognition to find all the specials and rebates being offered by manufacturers and car dealerships and any available vehicles that apply to them.

This type of site and others that are creating unique and specific information are getting a huge lift from referrals from social networks.

The habit of jumping to Google or any of the search engines is being lessened by this synergy of social communication and specialized sites. Real time search seems to be a tag that some of this is being given, but in reality the web is just catching up with what we as social animals have been doing since tribes existed.

Google's placing of the latest mentions of a search term in to their results may be considered real time search, but when the twitter comments are part of the mix it really isn't filtered well for relevancy unless you were looking for what is being commented on at the moment for those keywords.

Most Twitter apps have a search function that pulls that information and one would tend to use that as opposed to going over to Google.

The impact of Twitter on search is like a conversation where someone will ask the people involved if they know X - if no one does you will usually see someone grab a smart phone and start doing a search, but before that the answer can come from the group. That answer will be given more weight than any that be be found through a search engine if the group places faith in source.

Social media is creating an environment similar to our preWeb days when everyone had those people we contacted for various types of answers - this is ingrained in our human nature and the social media is helping. Maybe prior to the mass communication tools Google had become one of those sources - we were willing to give up the preferred human reference points for the quickness and ease of responses. But with the presence of social media maybe we are reverting back.