Twitter supports 800m search queries a day (misleading stats!)

"Twitter is supporting 800 million queries a day, or 33 percent more than it said it was handling back in April, according to co-founder Biz Stone, who spoke at the Aspen Ideas Festival today.
That means the company, which is trying to brand itself as an “information network” rather than a social network, is handling 24 billion queries a month. The last time the company reported daily search volumes was back in April at its inaugural developer conference, Chirp, when it said it was supporting 600 million queries a day.
It’s hard to compare Twitter’s monthly query volume to that of Microsoft’s Bing or Yahoo, since worldwide figures for their traffic are fairly old. Comscore reported that Bing was supporting 4.1 billion monthly queries worldwide while Yahoo was handling 9.4 billion in December."
Source: Biz Stone of Twitter, reported by VentureBeat, 6th July 2010
Note - I think the wording 'supporting 800m queries a day' suggests that these include the 'live' results within Google and other search engines, and not just searches within twitter.
Update - these figures are misleading, as they include automated scrapes from apps like Tweetdeck:
"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.""
Source:  Marketing Vox, 9th July 2010