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Wednesday
Oct072009
Charticle: The Battle for Real-Time Search
Young Urban Professional
Ann Smarty at ProductiveWise sizes up the various options for tapping into real-time search - Twitter, Facebook, Google and Friendfeed. Personally, I am finding Google's new search options to be outstanding - an addicting.
Reader Comments (9)
steve u have FB+FF vs Google vs Twitter. It doesnt compute to me. Is Google Still old news? How will they become instant?
@Anthony, the chart isn't mine. Have you tried the search options on Google? They're quite good and getting better everyday.
isn't google's search now much faster than 1 hour? also, how do companies that are targeting the realtime search space such as oneriot.com stack up?
Google can be instant too: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/even-more-recent-google-search-results.html (up to one second).Actually, you wrote a post about that trick http://www.steverubel.com/google-real-time-search-bookmarklet :)
The real issue in real time search is how much spam and trivia. Page ranking with back links doesn't work since there aren't back links to new content. So you need different algorithms and filtering. Check out Line Spout for high quality real time search.
Steve, isn't it that FF only contains contents from feeds that FF users added to their respective accounts? So, a search in FF may not return a complete view of any one subject within the given platform (ie. Twitter, etc.). Am I mistaken?I believe in the near future, when some sort of integration between the FF and FB platforms, will offer a competitive position for FaceBook against Google.
@Vinko you have that right.
I'm still uncertain why "real-time" search has become such a buzzword and so important to benchmarking the abilities of a search engine. The function of a search engine is to search. Hopefully, this search has access to a large amount of data that is extremely varied. On this point, all but Google fail. What can be gleaned from Facebook and Friendfeed sources is limited and self-limited. I'll have to let it suffice to say that Twitter contains so much noise I feel it's fairly useless as a resource. Turning back to Google, for a moment, their largest problem has not been the amount of data they collect, but the frustratingly limited way it's been possible to search it. If my search is too specific, I end up with nothing. If it's general enough, I end with some unreasonable number of hits. Google, though popular, for quite sometime has been an abysmal search engine. I am very glad to see that changing recently.As far as the necessity for "real-time" searches, I believe that by monitoring a particular topic or discussion of a brand might be helpful in a larger perspective, but responding to such information "real-time" can be, at best, reactionary. On the other hand, I suppose I can understand the value of more immediate changes in search rankings, brand buzz, and such for the SEO gurus. That, however, is a very different topic.
There are at least another dozen companies doing "real-time search".