Google stated back in July 2009 that real-time search was going to be their greatest challenge. It seemed that Bing had knocked out the internet giant with a tiny little rock for a while, when Microsoft announced a partnership between Bing, Facebook and Twitter to deliver real-time search results for the popular social networking sites. Now Google has caught up and jumped on the wagon – and they certainly rocked it around a bit in the process! Today we’re exploring Google’s real time search.
Google’s real time search was launched early in December, but not all users would have noticed the effect immediately. When you search for a topic that is trending on Twitter or elsewhere on the web, you may get the real time search results box – or you may not. If you search for results with the ‘Any Time’ option selected, you will usually only get real time results on ultra-hot topics. If you specifically want real-time results, you can go to ‘Show Options’ (just underneath the Google logo on the left hand side of a results page), and select ‘Latest’ instead of ‘Any Time’. If you do, you’ll notice that the entire results page keeps constantly updating itself, and most results in here will be from news sites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc.
Google’s offering seems to go beyond Microsoft’s in that they say they have improved their crawlers to offer a huge range of results in real time, not only status updates from Twitter and Facebook. Another qualification to the real-time search offering is that rather than simply being a stream of data, the real-time search results are filtered of spam and other irrelevant information. Google orders the results using these criteria:
• Author quality – which is likely linked to Pagerank
• Probability of relevance
• Query popularity
Concerns about quality
While most are enthusiastic about the change, some have expressed concern that the results will be ‘cheapened’ by the inclusion of real time search. That the inclusion of non-vetted information that can be published immediately by anyone on Google’s front page makes the entire thing less relevant. This is not a common opinion, however!
Benefits to business
The real-time search feature has some very ‘real’ benefits for businesses, as well as ordinary web surfers. These include:
• Web 2.0 is now firmly established – it makes sense to have content from the new web indexed in Google since it is one of the most popular info types on the net.
• If you are looking for breaking news or new information, the pages with what you are looking for probably haven’t had time to build themselves up to Google’s front page quality standards … which can take months!
• Other people’s opinions have become one of the most valuable information currencies on the web. The real-time search makes these more easily accessible.
CNet, though, expressed very real concerns about the balance between determining what is correct within the latest results for a subject. Most of the content is from sources that undergo little verification – users will have to keep that grain of salt in their mouths as they scroll through the real time results. It can take time for the truth to emerge … and when a random person’s thoughts are appearing on the front page of Google, they can hold a lot more judgmental weight.
So use the real-time search, and love the real-time search … but always remember to put that skeptic’s hat on before you click over to those ‘Latest Results’!
