If there was any doubt that real-time was becoming one of the biggest things in search they’ve been dispelled now that Google has entered the ring all guns blazing. The company held a “Search Event” to make several announcements, though it was scarce with the details beforehand, and it certainly delivered with the biggest move being the new real-time features integrated in the search engine at a level that no one else offers at the moment. Entries from Twitter, blogs, Facebook and other sources will show up and be updated in real time for relevant queries.
“[I]mmediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page,” Amit Singhal, Google Fellow (his actual title) wrote.
Google has had a form of ‘real-time envy’ for at least half a year now when the company acknowledged that it was behind in the field and that places like Twitter were doing a much better job at bringing up the freshest information. In the mean time, countless sites and services have popped up or added some sort of real-time component. … (read more)