by SEO Consultant
R. Falconer
Google has announced the launch of its real-time search which will go fully live sometime over the next few days in the US, UK, Australia and India. Further countries/languages will be available early next year.R. Falconer
Google has released a demo video on You Tube:
Results are being pulled from around the web from sites such as Twitter, Yahoo! Answers and other social media sites as well as from traditional sources such as news articles, regular web-pages and blogs. Facebook and MySpace information has been promised later.
Google has built algorithms that trigger these results when a certain term becomes popular i.e. when it suddenly becomes newsworthy. These terms appear to correlate well with searches that go hot on Google Trends. At the time of writing "baghdad explosions" is the number one "Hot Topic" but real-time search appears to be lacking a little bit:
It fares much better for "copenhagen climate change":
The results, as you can see above, appear in a scrolling box within the results. The box updates constantly with new results, presenting more results to the user who also has the option to pause the feed.
So how will this affect the world of search marketing? In the short term, it's unlikely that it will change much from the point of view of companies using SEO or Adwords. The real-time results only appear for very specific searches that are seen as hot topics by Google, so it's unlikely that many of the big-money searches will have these results very often.
What it does do in the medium to long term is cement Google's position as the leading search engine - Bing and Yahoo! have again got some catching up to do. Bing has Twitter search results but these are clearly not as sophisticated and come purely from Twitter. It's possible that Google's real-time search will now force Bing to bring more sources into its Twitter search.
