Recently it has become fashionable in technical circles to parrot the line that Google is facing a grave crisis. “They can’t do real-time or social search”, the argument goes:  faced with obsolescence, “they‘ll have no choice but to buy Twitter” cry the doom-mongers. Of course if we look at the reasons often given to explain Google’s imminent demise, it soon becomes clear that nothing is clear except that Google is unlikely to wave the white flag any time soon.

With regards to real-time search, the argument is that Google simply isn’t able to provide up-to-the-minute results for topical searches, and that the human powered search of sites, such as Twitter & Facebook, are much better suited for such tasks.

However, I decided to test this myself.  I searched on Google for cricket scores on the Sunday of the final one-day cricket international between England & Australia. The results brought up the latest scores, right there on the page. I then conducted a search on Twitter, and in their results were untold conversations about the cricket, as well as links to lots of places where I could find the scores, but nothing there on the page. Ditto on Facebook: cricket groups aplenty, but no sign of the score itself.

As for social search, many say that Google simply won’t be able to compete with search results created by mapping the connections of users of social networks. This of course ignores the fact that the whole reason that Google came to dominate search is because it looked at the inter-connected nature of the web and based its results on these connections. Years before anyone was talking about social networks, Google was using the wisdom of crowds to judge what people would be interested in and through Gmail and other services, it has been able to build up a database that allows it to show users unique results based on their personal preferences.

On top of that, whilst the failure of Yahoo! to take a lead in search despite having access to millions of pieces of social data through Delicious & Flickr, suggests that having access to such data isn’t a guarantor of success; it’s worth remembering that Google owns the biggest social network in two of the world’s largest emerging markets, India and Brazil, Orkut, before writing it off. Especially when one considers that most social networks have, to date, had to buy in search technology (Twitter & Summize) or companies whose staff should understand it (Facebook & FriendFeed) with, in the case of Twitter at least, pretty minimal improvements to show in their services to date.

Of course anyone making predictions about the digital landscape is almost always at risk of ending up eating their words before too long. So, will Google win at real-time search as it has in search up till now? Maybe. Will people increasingly start using sites like Twitter to find information? Probably. Will Google go ahead and buy Twitter? Who knows?

All I do know is that if Google really wanted to enter a partnership which would enable it to power its search results based on recommendations, all it has to do is fulfil the prophecy of Epic 2015 and organise a tie-up with the people-powered recommendation engine of Amazon.