Google Now Highlights Top Links Cited in Status Updates

Google has made a small tweak to its real-time search tools, which scours Twitter, Friendfeed and public Facebook status updates. Now when you search for any keyword and refine your search results to either "recent" or "updates," the search engine will also extract the most cited links for that particular keyword.

Here is an example (see above images). A status update search for Tiger Woods pulls up recent tweets on the left and "top links" on the right. If you click any "all mentions" link this pulls up related status updates pointing to that particular URL. This can be invoked for any URL with a simple "link:" command and I imagine it would be a snap to create a bookmarklet to execute such a search against any web URL.

I have always felt that Google is the company to beat in real-time search and this is another example of how they're going to continually enhancing their feature set. Good stuff.

Comments

[Adrian Lurssen]

Do you know: our Facebook Page updates included in Google's definition of public FB status updates?Thanks.

[Adrian Lurssen]

Sorry typo: "are" not "our"

[Steve Rubel]

To be honest I am not sure if page updates are in there yet.

[Annie Infinite]

This is fascinating news! The mind boggles with possibilities :) thank you for letting us into the news.

[jeremyhylton]

Updates from Facebook Pages are included. Glad you like the top links.

[Quinton Parker]

"Google is the company to beat in real-time search" <-->m fairly confident that google buying results from the twitter firehose as is many other SEs & aggregators

[Edouard Fiess]

Nice article... Very interesting and definitely the next thing to take into account when watching e-reputation... Thanks for the heads-up ;)

[Bernd]

Nice. But on the other hand, obviously Google now has a big problem to identify the original source with the new real-time search. I saw a lot of websites where the "newer" twitter- or friendfeed snippet (and the usual suspects who generate their content by twitter- and friendfeed- rss feeds) are placed before the "older" original website in the "normal" serps. In worst case the original source is placed on page 3 or 4. Twitter and friendfeed both work with nofollow and they also don't use cross-domain canonical-tags - additionally anybody is able to grab your own rss-feeds and place it on several twitter-accounts. It might make sense that Google tries to improve their ability to see who is the "spiritual father" of the news.

[Jonas]

Good idea to try and make it easier to find the original source.It's a minor tweak, but anything that enhances usability and the ability to find stuff easily helps out!PS: Why is friendfeed being scoured for real time data? Do people actually still use it? I mean no disrespect, but too few seem to use it to make a real difference....