microblogging

Google and realtime search

Posted by Rik Stewart December 9th, 2009

Google has added real-time search to the search results. But is it a good thing?

Anyone who uses the internet on a regular basis cannot ignore Twitter. It is a little like a mosquito buzzing around your bed when you are trying to sleep. But even if like me, you are not a great fan of Twitter, you cannot deny the incredible rise in the popularity of Twitter and microblogging in general, I even blogged about it back in August.

On Monday Google announced that it would now be including real-time data in its main results pages.

This did not really come as a great surprise as Google (and Bing) announced a deal with Twitter at the end of October. Google was bound to add real-time search in one form or another.

Bing included a small amount of Tweets at its launch and followed that up with a dedicated Twitter search page, which is still in beta.

A recent report from Reuters discussed a deal between Yahoo! and OneRiot, a real-time search engine that pulls in data from "Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services". This was followed soon after by an announcement on the Yahoo! Search Blog that real-time search data would be added to the Yahoo! News Shortcut "relevant photos, videos and tweets about a breaking news story". Twitter data is included via a Twitter tab. It is very likely that Yahoo! will include more real-time data in the future.

Google has really taken things a step further. Its real-time search appears as a scrollable section with the heading "Latest results for…" on the front page of results. Going by Google’s announcement it seems that it will not just show Tweets:

…our new partners that we’re announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago

.

For me this is a step in the wrong direction, if I want to read tweets I go to twitter. It is just another "extra" cluttering up the search results page.

Caroline McGuckian asked the following in her blog post Google: Even Better Than The Real (Time) Thing?

Are these Tweets, unfairly dismissed as inane chatter by some, going to improve searchers’ experience or should Google just be concentrating on improving their ever changing algorithm which is the best we have but by no means perfect?

I would answer, the inane chatter can, unfortunately, no longer be dismissed now that Google has put it, as it were, centre stage. It doesn’t improve my search experience and Google should just be concentrating on improving its algorithm.

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Searching microblogs

Posted by Rik Stewart August 6th, 2009

The popularity of microblogging and, in particular, of Twitter has spawned many websites that try to capitalise on the growing trend, making “Real Time Search” a “hot new thing”.

The popularity of microblogging and, in particular, of Twitter has spawned many websites that try to capitalise on the growing trend, making "Real Time Search" a "hot new thing". Tweefind, for example, lets you search tweets and orders the results by "user rank", whilst Twingly provides search for blogs and microblogs.

All of this microblogging activity has obviously gained the attention of the major search engines. In April, there were rumours that Google was in talks to buy Twitter, and in June Google Operating System blog reported that Google was working on a microblogging search engine. It is interesting to note that Google did own a microblogging service called Jaiku, which it bought in October 2007. In January 2009, Google announced that Jaiku would become open source and that Google would no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase.

Then, in early July, Bing announced that it would be bringing Twitter content to Bing results. Primarily, these results are from a group of "the more prominent and prolific twitterers". Later in the month, Bing came out with another announcement, stating that Microsoft, together with Twitter and Federated Media, were introducing a portal called BingTweets, which would combine Bing results and content from Twitter.

Just as a completely non scientific, non-exhaustive test, I thought I’d tweet and then see how quickly bingtweets, Twingly and Tweefind would pick it up. I tweeted "Whatever happened to Long Fin Killie http://bit.ly/XknzR by rights they should have been huge."

I was very impressed to find that Twingly, BingTweets and Tweefind all found my tweet almost instantaneously. Although, for some reason, Twingly had me posting "3 minutes ago" less than 1 minute after I’d tweeted.

Microblogging and real-time search are, I think, here to stay and will possibly be more important as time goes on.

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