A lot of hyperbole has surrounded real time search – with this particular subject being one of the major talking points during the recent SMX conference in the US – but as to whether this has or will change our search habits is yet to be seen.
At this moment in time real time search is incumbent of social media: a Facebook status is real time; a tweet is real time; using Friend Feed can incorporate the two. The most renowned real time search engine is Twitter search which obviously only searches Twitter and has no algorithm.
The mother of social media, Facebook, also has real time capabilities but to a lesser extent and has no search functionality, hash tagging or trending topics.
As we all know, people want information and they want it fast. Aside from optaining a flying Delorean complete with Flux Capcitor, finding news and information as it happens seems to be the goal of the western world.
Most fundamentally, the main benefit of real time search at present is the ability to find out localised news a lot quicker than you can via Google/Bing/Yahoo. E.g. if I wanted to find out why the city is gridlocked and I didn’t have a radio with access to travel news at hand then I would be able to search real-time, via a mobile device such as iPhone, Blackberry etc or via the internet using Twitter search or a whole host of other real time search engines (which I will discuss in my next blog post).
I would soon be able to find out that, for instance, a motorbike accident had caused the jams. Google News couldn’t tell me that until a news article had been written, published, crawled and indexed.
This could be perceived as a powerful resource yet the king of search, Google, do not appear to be concerned by real time search. Jeremy Hylton of Google Blog search believes that as Google becomes quicker at ranking new content, using its ever evolving algorithm, users will be able to find information most relevant to their search, whereas with real time search users currently have to sift through to find useful information and even then you have to follow links to find that information.
Wikipedia is a fine example – updated regularly and therefore crawled and indexed quickly to share up to date information.
Another negative aspect of real time search is that it contains spam which is not moderated, and can be increasingly frustrating.
Even though Bing have started to index certain well know Twitterers and Yahoo are considering a similar tweak to their search results (Google’s search options and URL hack allows similar functionality), there is little evidence that the search giants are making great strides towards entering the real time search market.
The bottom line is that at present nobody in the world of SEO knows exactly where real time search will go in terms of its user relevancy, but with search big hitters such as Google, Bing and Yahoo seemingly doing little more than offerring a few tweaks to search options you could perhaps draw your own conclusions.
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