If we started teaching you how to optimise your Twitter tweets during an internet marketing seminar then you’d probably think that we weren’t all there. After all, LeadGenerators are experts in search engine optimisation and Twitter isn’t actually a search engine, or is it?

Well according to Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founder, the site is now supporting 800 million search queries per day. This is an astronomical amount, particularly when you compare it to the largest competitor in the field – Google, which supports 88 billion search queries each month.

This number may not be a threat to Google just yet, but it’s certainly worrying for Yahoo and Bing! It isn’t only the search figures that could prove worrying for these two competing search engines, but also the rate in which the Twitter search engine is growing. Figures from Nielsen show that since last April, Twitter searches have increased by 33% whereas Bing searches have only managed a 22% increase in the United States.

Rather than competing, it seems the search engines are doing all that they can to work together in harmony. Twitter has formed search partnerships with Google, Microsoft and Bing, where the sites can use all of Twitter’s search data and implement it into one overall package. This happened as Twitter’s search results are in real-time, so its competitors wanted a piece of the action. The CEO of Twitter, Evan Williams has expressed interested in improving the Twitter search engine and making it much more intuitive, with this in mind it looks like Twitter’s competitors have a real battle on their hands and unless Bing and Yahoo can start offering real time search results, bringing in the number of queries that Twitter does, we might have to start running seminars on Twitter optimisation.