The World's Fastest Growing Search Engine is... Twitter!

The choice of search engine for most including myself is,  Google. Why? Because me and most people grew up with it. But I was exposed to a variety of them from Ask Jeeves - (which is now Ask.com), MSN Search which is now Bing, maybe its the simple fact that saying "Google It" just works for most in any situation.The latest news however, suggests that Twitter Search is growing at a crazy rate with queries ranging in the 800 million per day. Doing the math that is around 24 billion per month - almost 4 times the population of the World. Or to bring it back to search engines that is actually more an the number of queries via Bing and Yahoo combined (4.1 billion and 9.4 billion respectively).Of course, Google is at 88 billion queries per month, but considering the age of Twitter it is hard to deny that it's in fact catching up. Let's track back to April this year, Twitter search has increased by 33% or more than a 1/3 increase in less than two months - the figures don't lie, or do they? For an avid user of Twitter, I will admit there are times where I just choose to ask a question, hoping that someone who is following me will be less lazy than me and just give me an answer - but I am not sure I choose to use the Twitter search. Although Twitter has been classified as  a 'social network' - it isn't really just that, in many ways it is used to connect with more people online but it does have many uses like keeping up with the news, marketing, online shopping on top of just the regular searching. With that in mind, it is definitely more versatile then the regular social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.Take a more recent example: The FIFA 2010 World Cup - Twitter was the place to get up to the second live updates, making it more favourable than other search engines for obvious reasons but like other international sporting events, it highlighted one of Twitter's downfalls with the increase in "Fail-Whales" and decreased API limits. There have been other examples like natural disasters or breaking news on other issues of how Twitter is the place to go when looking for real-time information on issues which are updated so constantly.Of course, whether or not Twitter will be able to take the lead off Google is highly debateable - with their current growth it seems likely. Unfortunately it is constantly plagued by stability issues which have been cropping up more frequently than before.Do you think Twitter is a potential adversary to Google?Let us know.