Search engines have improved their capabilities over the years to integrate near realtime information in their search engine results. Lately, many search engines decided that it would be a good idea to integrate Twitter results. This frankly did not yield the desired “freshness update” the search engines where hoping for, largely because of the amount of spam that hit sites like Twitter every day, and considering that the inclusion in the search results made spamming even more lucrative.
A consequence of that may be that Google decided to move Google Realtime Search to a new address. It is not clear from the announcement if the realtime results in the main Google search engines remain; We were not able to find any at this point in time though.
Realtime search is currently rolled out in 40 different languages, and it will take some time before every user can access the new address www.google.com/realtime.
A temporary address has been created to give everyone the ability to test Google Realtime Search right away. Users just need to follow this link to do so.
On the new homepage you’ll find some great tools to help you refine and understand your results. First, you can use geographic refinements to find updates and news near you, or in a region you specify. So if you’re traveling to Los Angeles this summer, you can check out tweets from Angelenos to get ideas for activities happening right where you are
google realtime search
In addition, we’ve added a conversations view, making it easy to follow a discussion on the real-time web. Often a single tweet sparks a larger conversation of re-tweets and other replies, but to put it together you have to click through a bunch of links and figure it out yourself. With the new “full conversation” feature, you can browse the entire conversation in a single glance. We organize the tweets from oldest to newest and indent so you quickly see how the conversation developed.
Finally, we’ve also added updates content to Google Alerts, making it easy to stay informed about a topic of your choosing. Now you can create an alert specifically for “updates” to get an email the moment your topic appears on Twitter or other short-form services. Or, if you want to manage your email volume, you can set alerts to email you once per day or week.
google alerts
So, Google Realtime Search in its current stage is based 100% on Twitter. It is probably safe to say that this has an impact on the reach and quality of results. Twitter is not popular in every country on the globe which reduces the functionality and use of the search engine for users from those countries.
We do think that Google made a good decision to move realtime search to its own address, especially if that means that realtime search was removed from standard Google search.
What’s your take on this development? Let us know in the comments.
Update: Realtime Search on Google has been removed, at least from this website address. There does not seem to be a new address for it currently.
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What about bandwidth usage, i am concerned about it.