Real Time Search

Filed in archive Technology on December 24, 2009

Google announced the fruits of its earlier deal with Twitter, showing off how it has decided to present real-time Internet content within search results. Amit Singhal, Google fellow, introduced the real-time section during an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

Google real-time search updates as stuff is happening around the Web - for example, live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles and Web pages now stream in on the actual result pages for your query. When you enter popular search terms into Google, your results page will include a "Latest results for" section that features a constantly updating window of real-time results that usually shows up about halfway down the first results page.




While "real-time search" has certainly been a buzzword this year, the concept itself has been around for a while longer in some capacity. Sure, the concept of searching Twitter has been around for quite some time now, but even as far as Google is concerned, freshness has been a factor of great interest.

Bing already integrates real-time Twitter and Facebook results. But unlike Bing, however, Google's real-time search results are embedded in your regular search results page instead of a dedicated real-time page. Also, Yahoo plans to launch its own feature to integrate tweets into search results. Yahoo will join Google witih integrated results as of Thursday, said Larry Cornett, vice president of product management and design at the company. But in a crucial difference between the two approaches, Yahoo has not cut a deal with Twitter for access to the "firehose," an automated feed of data from Twitter. Instead, it's using Twitter's public API and adding its own algorithms to figure out which tweets are most relevant to the query.

If you don't yet see the service can get to a version of it using the Google Trends site, which just emerged from beta testing. The "hot topics" area that shows items of high search interest at the moment, and clicking on one of the results shows search results with the scrolling real-time feed of information.