Real time search is Here (on Google)
As we spoke about yesterday, Google has made its latest bid to deliver up-to-the-minute results. It was just earlier this year Twitter fired the starting pistol in the race to deliver ‘real time’ content in the Search Engine Results Pages. A few months later all three major search engines announced deals to integrate Twitter content into the the main search index.
It seems like Google is first across the finish line (or is it just the half way point?) in the real time sprint.
At an event this week, the search engine showcased plans to increasingly surface messages from social networks in the main Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
The whole aim is to make sure users see the latest information about a brand or product by pulling in the latest entries from social networks, news sites and blogs.
And yesterday we saw the result of the changes. At the top of the SERPs for the keyword ‘webeden’ we saw that latest conversations that were happening on the WebEden Twitter profile. Users had the option of clicking ‘latest results’ to see many more more of those updates.
This is what it looked like:
Google say that they will continue to augment the SERPs with a string of updated messages. And it’s all because people are using their social networks to talk about events as they happen. Google want that chatter to be available to people searching on Google, so that when an event happens people think ‘Google’ and not just ‘Twitter’ or ‘facebook’.
“Information is being posted at a pace I have never seen before. In this information environment, seconds matter.” said Google executive Amit Singhal.
Here’s the official Youtube video about real time results:
What do you think of Real Time search? Genuinely useful or a bit of ‘nice to have’ fluff? Leave us a comment below.