Posts Tagged ‘Google’

What Is Real-Time Search Anyway?

Google just introduced new features to their search results that brings a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web.  Now, immediately 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, Google will show the most recent posts towards the top of the search results page.

Where do the feeds come from? Google announced official partnerships with the following web entities; Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca to power their aggregate real-time feeds.

Get a first look at the new search interface and some sample searches.

So the big, very big question is what does this mean?  More spam unfortunately. More attempts by affiliate marketers to skew the system in their favor and more automated recycling of posts to always have a presence in real time results. It’s not going to be a bed of roses while the search engines get to grips with reputation management of the contributors that author content on these new partners. We know that Twitter’s user profile management is basic at best. Silly algorithms that weight banal factors as negatives or positives can easily be circumvented and before you know it you’re being stuffed with affiliate cookies and pimped malware for having clicked on what you thought was a legitimate real-time search result from your ‘trusted’, favorite search engine Google.

Moving away from the pessimistic side of what will happen, there will be advantages. More so for mobile search’s integration of real-time results. That’s another post however.

Anyway, real-time is  rolling out over the next few days and when you have it, you’ll see it just happening withing your search results.

Google Social Search

Google Social Search is an experimental feature that allows you to do searches that find relevant public web content from people in your social circle.

When you join the Social Search experiment Google will bring up results from your friends and contacts. These special results appear at the bottom of the search results page. Your social circle consists of contacts from your Gmail and sites listed in your Google Profile.

The following people make up your social circle:

  • People you’re connected to through social services that you’ve listed in your Google profile, such as Twitter and FriendFeed.
  • People in your Gmail (or Google Talk) chat list.
  • People in your Friends, Family, and Coworkers contact groups for Google.

If someone you don’t know shows up in your social search results, it’s likely that they’re connected to someone you do know. For example, if you’re following someone on Twitter, and that person is following five other people, those five other people are also included in your social circle.

We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words so we’ve included a video from Google explaining in more detail what Google Social Search is all about. Enjoy!