Earlier this week Twitter cofounder Biz Stone told a conference that Twitter's "search queries" are up to 800 million per day - an eye-popping number that rivals Google traffic. However, as the week wore on the industry became increasingly skeptical about it.

By the week's end it was dismissed. Twitter's search query numbers aren't as impressive as they sound, according to Nicholas Carlson at the Business Insider, namely for this reason: "Twitter's search query numbers include "searches" from Twitter apps such as TweetDeck and Seesmic that are actually just automated calls those apps send out every few minutes to populate columns users have set up to see tweets on certain topics."

As for suggestions that Twitter is now the top search engine: one's a network, the other's a news publisher - this is not comparing like with like, is how Paid Content put it. "In the same way, one can't group Twitter together with web search services and proclaim: "Twitter has taken the title." Sure, both such services have a search function, but each indexes a very different kind of material - one, rapid-fire conversations and news updates; the other, deeper, more static and longer-lasting information."