Google Takes on Elon Musk's Twitter with Google Explore

With Elon Musk taking up Twitter and making largescale changes to the app a lot of people are looking at alternatives and there are a lot of apps looking to take its place and in the midst of it is google's attempt to take that space with google Explore which is in testing as of now

What is Google Explore  ?

This is a screen shot of how it looks as of now it is available only on mobile but it is expected to expand and is a mix of Google discover and it is being tested right in the middle of google search if I were Elon Musk I would be worried.

This is built by doing a topic specific google discover which is pretty popular and is a decent product but serves as an addon to google search app on android . Google Discover is pretty popular on android phones as it is built into google search app on ios it is popular but not as much but these days google is testing it right in the middle of google search.

Google rolled this in Spetember of 2022 as part of their search on event but mentioned it as a small sidenote focussed only on travel but it seems to be taking over all of topical searches for notable persons.

Here is another screenshot of a Jeff Bezos search

Google Explore vs  Elon Musk's Twitter 

As a proper twitter junkie I know that this is good but the problem as always with everything google is that it is algorithm driven I cannot control what i want to see which Twitter's chronological feed option allows but most people prefer the alogorithm content of facebook and google discover so this one would be a win win for them and also help solve the problem google has it is not really good for newsy content and is mostly better for information rich subjects. For Twitter they have lot of problems but a basic problem is that they cannot control spam bots and genuine content creators get drowned out in that content which makes their advertsing extremely ineffective as compared to facebook and that is a subject for another post

Google Explore : What Can you do as a Creator and Marketer

As a Creator it will make things much tougher Google has a preference for big sites over small blogs and interesting content and there are no likes and shares so you will have to optimize it in the same way you can do for discover create great images and make click worthy but not click baity titles.

Google's Search Problems

Google is not great at surfacing interesting content from sites like this one as it focuses on large websites and its own content to the detriment of others the likes of Twitter and Substack offers a great way to surface this kind of content but have way limited reach. Google is great at using AI and giving answers to the question with solutions like discover and explore it is trying to get some amount of social audience using the Tiktok style vertical feed which is addicting to users and the current craze for all tech executives.

Twitter's Problems

Technically the problem for twitter is that its advertising is not good enough and instead of users the platform has a heavy proliferation of bots. Another of twitter's problem is that it is a text heavy platform and needs images and videos in its feed and right now if elon is able to get rid of bots and increase Twitter penetration towards humans and then fix its ads it can actually create a big challenge to google and can actually be the largest traffic driver towards news and interesting content though information heavy content will always remain google's domain.