From The Google-Twitter Battlefront

A couple of news items about the war of strategy between Google and Twitter caught my eye today. First, from InternetNews.com's West Coast bureau chief, David Needle:

Google searches reference works, blogs, news sites, images, videos and much, much more. And since the company's stated mission is to "organize the world's information" can tapping into popular microblogging services like Twitter be far behind?

Apparently not, at least according to the unofficial blog Google Operating System. In a weekend post, GOS said Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is readying a service that would search and index Twitter feeds. Google already offers separate search services focused on News and Blogs, and GOS says a microblogging search along these lines is in the works that would search results by relevancy and could also be integrated with Google's Web search engine.

While Twitter itself offers search, results are sorted by date. Also, Google's search service would include other microblogging services such as, in theory, FriendFeed. Google had no comment directly on the blog post.

Comment or no comment, it's painfully obvious that Google would be planning a move like this, even if should go ahead and buys Twitter, as is constantly rumored. A bunch of smaller third-party companies already offer some kind of Twitter search service. Why would the world's top online search vendor stay on the sidelines of such a hot market?

Then there's this InternetNews.com article by Alex Goldman:

Can Twitter one day beat Google in driving traffic to Web sites?

It's a radical notion, but to venture capitalist Fred Wilson, it's not an impossibility.

Speaking [in New York] today at the 140 Characters conference, Wilson discussed the ways in which Twitter could make money -- the same way that Google does, by driving traffic to Web sites.

"Google is powerful because it drives more traffic to more places than anywhere else," Wilson explained. "It is the source for 40 to 60 percent -- sometimes 80 percent -- of the traffic for sites I'm involved in."

But, he said, he's seen Twitter -- and another social site that's rocketing to fame, Facebook -- growing faster than Google.

"Six months ago, I started noticing Twitter in the referrals on my blog. We invest in about 25 Web sites and they are willing to share analytics with us on a confidential basis. I compared the trend line for Twitter and Facebook to Google," he said. "Google is still dominant but it is growing at only about 1 percent per month. Facebook and Twitter are coming on hard. Traffic is growing at 30 to 40 percent per month from a small base."

I've seen similar percentages and trends. And while I'm a big Twitter fan, the service is a long way from challenging Google as a traffic referrer for most sites. This mostly is due to overall usage and familiarity. You'd be hard-pressed to find any Internet user who can't explain Google and how it works (at least generally). But try asking some relatives or people in your local coffee shop about Twitter and you'll get a range of responses from "I've been using it for a year" to "Is that the thing where you tell people what you had for lunch? It sounds stupid."

I think we'll have a much better idea of whether Twitter poses a threat to Google in a year or so.