Where do you find links of interest? Is it really from Google? I was looking up information on the Facebook purchase of FriendFeed and found an article talking about Facebook being the next big search engine…Google’s “real” threat. At first you probably go, “psssh, whatever,” but there was a time when you said that about HotBot too.

The article did point out something interesting about where people get there links. It suggests most people get more of their links from social network connections, not from straight up search engines like Google. As I thought about my own clicking behaviour I found quite a bit of truth in that theory.

When it comes to links of interests, I get most of mine through Twitter with a little dash of Facebook. Of course, blog feeds are a standard too, but it’s safe to say I’m not going to Google or Yahoo! to get my daily links on cartoons, toys, and web design. I use Google as a direct tool, a reference tool when I need something in a hurry.

If I need to know if my dog will get sick after eating a stick of perfume, I Google it. I don’t ask the Twitterverse. In those cases Google is faster and has much deeper pockets of data. But when it comes to links of casual interest, they all come from Twitter. Someone tweeted their review about the GI Joe movie, I clicked it and read it. I wasn’t looking for a GI Joe review, it wasn’t on my to-do list for the day, but there it was in front of me and hey, I’m interested in that - it was the equivalent of an impulse buy, an impulse click.

This happens to me hundreds of times everyday.

So which is a more valuable resource? The massive data pool that is a Google, or the massive data pool that is the social collective? One can lead to the other, but it really depends what type of information you’re after, but both are important and one is starting to outpace the other.

I’m not convinced Facebook is the next evolution of search engines, but adding social content to searching is critical for the next level of success. Whoever can smartly combine encyclopedic results (search engine) with socially relevant results (twitter) will be the big winner. These only exist in mash-up form right now, like Bing Tweets, but someone needs to turn it into a true service. That way when I search for help on pet health I’ll not only get the Yahoo Answers results but I’ll be connected with a vet doctor who was just talking on Twitter or Facebook.

The next day you spend computerizing, try to pay attention to how many links you click on from your Twitter or Facebook pages compared to the Google searches you run. And then think about why you’re Googling versus why you clicked on someone’s Twittered link.