Google Goes ‘Real Time’ With Search Results
Google held one of its search events today at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The company’s mission has always been to improve relevance (the basis for revenues via higher CTRs) and today’s announcements boil down to recent technologies that allow it to to do this.
Namely, these involve time and place — two factors that have grown in prominence with the recent developments and popularity of mobile and social. More on mobile in a bit. Social has brought us real-time search, as the standard unit of social media made popular by Twitter and Facebook is the status update.
This has ignited a need for real-time data, something that Google’s extensive yet somewhat static index didn’t really satisfy. Recent integrations with Twitter have provided this real-time data to supplement traditional results. But today’s announcement involves an official “real time search” (automatically refreshed) section of results pages for things like breaking news.
“Information is being created at a pace I’ve never seen before,” said Google Fellow Amit Singhal. “In this information environment, seconds matter.” Feeds will come directly from new partners Facebook and MySpace, as well as public feeds from sources like Twitter and Answers.com.
Though local wasn’t mentioned in the context of the real-time search integration, it will apply in many of the ways we’ve discussed in the past. Stay tuned.
