No sooner had we gotten used to the idea of “Universal Search” and every detail needed to understand what would go into dominating the search engine results pages with images, videos and text, than Google releases “Real-time Search”.
The question is how real time is the returns and how flawed are the results. The lack of Google’s ability to show real-time results was a weakness that many people felt hurt them in development. With the release of Universal Search so many interesting features were added to Google Suggest and Google Quick Scroll enabling Google’s search capabilities to save users time and enhance the user experience.
Real-time Google Search is available in English only for some people, but Google believes that by the first quarter of 2010 could be implemented in other languages. Some of the pages that will work with this new system will be Facebook, Twitter and MySpace sites that are updated every minute. For now if you want to see Real Time in action, I recommend choosing any of the terms found in Google Trends. Only for some specific terms will you see results, massive searches at a given time, so if you want to see it in action, I recommend choosing any of the terms in Google Trends.
Not Just Google but Bing too:
Both Bing and Google have agreements with Twitter to take every tweet (post or message) and analyze each with its own technology to deliver relevant results to searchers. There were already some partial solutions like Twitter Search Results for Google via GreaseMonkey, but this new real-time is certainly a step beyond.
We see that Bing has completely separated search Twitter, trying not to affect results pages (SERPs) for your main browser. While search engines can be added to Twitter as an input to the characterization of the sites that are part of their index, they do not plan to add sound to your results pages with tweets. Therefore we must see real-time searching as a new type of search, and existing (News, Blogs, images, etc), which is sorted by relevancy.
Social information is important and needed for business and individuals alike. Google’s new interest in blended results beyond Universal search is problematic on several dimensions. The sleek and streamlined results, Google used to serve, now look like a hodge podge of information. Gone are their austere results views, no longer conforming to the most relevant and best results credo. Add sponsored results which are now even more wonky given the addition of images in paid search and the results pages looks terrible.
My concern stems from sources of information used and information available for use. So much of what happens in this world takes place in extranets and behind forum walls that truly influence our everyday lives that search engines have no access or insight into. So how real is real time search?