Twitter is a search engine? - no, Twitter is a web sub(eco)system

TechCrunch reckons it is:

People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That’s valuable stuff.

Twitter knows it, too. They’re going to build their business model on it. Forget small time payments from users for pro accounts and other features, all they have to do is keep growing the base and gather more and more of those emotional grunts. In aggregate it’s extremely valuable. And as Google has shown, search is vastly monetizable - somewhere around 40% of all online advertising revenue goes to ads on search listings today.

And as John Battelle says, its not clear that Google or anyone else can compete with Twitter at this point (Facebook’s giving it a solid try, though).

And it’s not just ads that can bring in the money. Brands need tools to make sense of all this data that Twitter doesn’t yet supply. Third parties like Scout Labs are going to be mining this data themselves, I’m sure.

I'd say its more accurate to say that Twitter is an entire "Real Time Web" value chain - it has content, aggregation (including search), distribution and client side systems - all 4 parts of the media delivery value chain. It also has an open API so that anyone can build applications for it - including real time search engines to search Twitter if they know how (we have modified our real time blog search engine to search Twitter for example, not that much work at all)