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Real Time Search – What does it mean?

ArchieIndian Sunday, December 13th, 2009

Google is up and running with its real time search . We at Microreviews thought of taking a look at the real time search introduced by the search giant in one go. However, let this be said, you got to try it to understand it. Before reading the post, you can even take a shot at it. I tried searching “Google” on Google and then tried to get the real-time updates on it.
In this post, we will not take up the implications of the real time status updates on the search engine results. Right now, the implications are wide open and is hot. Like other enthusiasts across the globe, we are tracking the same and would come back with an analysis soon on Microreviews.

So what is real time search?

Real time search  basically boils down to searching the information contained in our status updates on the various micro-blogging, social networking and information sharing sites. These happen to be much quicker than the updates on various news sites around the world. What with, over a billion people sharing information from various parts of the world.

Why was the real time search needed?

Sometime back, this year when there was a lot of hue and cry over the Iran Election, whenever we typed Iraq on Google, we kept on getting the same old Wikipedia link which was very relevant to say the least, but was not what we wanted. However, a quick search on Twitter, the most popular microblogging site, gave us some stunning results. At this point, most search engines started including (and are expanding) ‘real-time search’ in some form or the other.Google and other search engines woke up to the importance of our status updates.

The Google Blog says “Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we’re announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.“

Here are some of the things I tried with Google today, and there were some interesting discoveries right away.

I was on the Google home page and clicked on the I am feeling lucky button without typing in any search query. I saw a counter ad couldn’t understand what it meant. My natural instinct told me “Google it”. The results, I got were not what I was looking for.

The results were not exactly what I was looking for showing me the original definition of I am feeling lucky and other stuff.

The realtime stuff had not yet achived the relevance to get to the top of the results. So, I clicked on the “Show Options” to get to the filtering options.

From here the filtering got easier and i clicked on the latest filter.

I quickly realized how the real time web was taking over the search world by a storm. In order to get real time search merged with google, try searching something which is trending on google and you will see it.

Having seen all this, I quickly realized the problems which Google has with the irrelevant trending hash-tags of Twitter. The fact that Bing has ruled out the possibility of integrating the real-time stuff readily into their search results makes the strategical search engine market even more interesting. Bing will continue to provide the twitter search results at a separate URL at bing.com/twitter.

Google Trends has come out of Beta(Donot forget to check Trendrr which I find more interesting at times than Google trends) and we can see Google trends at the end of the search results, if it happens to be relevant.

The next big thing which I am looking forward to is the integration of facebook updates and how people react to their social networking Gossips getting crawled by Google just because they clicked on yes to a privacy statement they didn’t bother to read. There will be a lot of changes in the way search results are seen. There will be privacy policy checks done. The Web Analytics parameters will undergo a huge change. We will also recommend people to have a look at the Yahoo search results which have also started putting twitter status updates along with other results.Scoopler, SocialMention and Collecta are the other three realtime search engine, I would like the readers to try out.We at microreviews will keep a look at these and try to put them up for you all.

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Tags: Facebook, friendfeed, google, Google Trend, identi.ca, Jaiku, Myspace, search, twitter