There was a lot of talk earlier this year of how Twitter and Facebook will bring value to internet search.

Twitter for example added a new feature to make searching for people simpler by creating a new People tab. Also, the Twitter search engine is very impressive and capable tool for yielding results based on Twitter’s live streams. You don’t even need an account. Just go to Twitter’s search page, and type in what you are interested in. To find a more concentrated conversation around a topic, you can use the hashtag (#) along with your term. For instance, #windows7 would yield results of people specifically talking about that topic who are purposely labeling their conversation with that tag to keep track of the conversation themselves.

Budgets for paid searches and using social media for SEO (better positioning your website on search engines, like Google) are going up this year based on a report on emarketer.com.

Do you search the social web?

UPDATE: I didn’t mention the almost upsetting relevance this subject has on traditional search concepts as Facebook (and Twitter saved searches) is now a significant threat to Google search because of the massive amount of data present on these networks.

Latinos Online

It’s funny how seemingly, slight differences between search terms can result in a world of difference.

I’ve been searching for information about Latinos in social media, so obviously I used that term – ‘Latinos in social media’. That criteria mostly results in LATISM activities (which, in of itself is a good thing). So, then I used ‘Hispanics in social media,’ which of course brings up some different results. However, I’ve looked through most of it already.

Desperate for some new perspectives, I accidently came across ‘Latinos Online,’ while searching through a show that I was on today. Bingo! New leads.