Real-Time Search: Google Continues Its Evolution of Search
Don Baker
In its quest to make Google all things to all users, Google continues to change the online search experience. Over the past year, Google has increasingly personalized results and made local-search results more relevant. Most recently, Google deployed Real-Time Search (RTS) in December 2009. RTS is Google's acknowledgement that the new, crowd-sourced information spread through popular social networks is increasingly important to searchers—and that Google's search index didn't have access to that information.
What impact does RTS have on your marketing efforts? On a positive note, work you are already doing to develop social network content, such as building your Twitter presence, will be given increased visibility as Google RTS results include more and more such posts. On the other hand, though, the results stream for RTS competes for page one real estate in Google search results, making it increasingly important that websites optimize content to achieve high rankings.
Why is Google Interested in Real-Time Search?
As just about everyone is aware, social networks began exploding in importance around 2006, and most online users now participate in one or more social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or Twitter. The discussions in these networks contain a lot of interesting and valuable information, including product reviews and other advice that people search the Net to find. Even better, the information on social networks is ongoing and up-to-the-minute.
The problem for Google was availability: most of this information wasn't easily accessible. Facebook chats, tweets and other network posts were not available to the major search engine bots, effectively segregating social media and requiring searchers to query social networks individually. What information Google was able to access wasn’t "real-time," often taking search engines days, not minutes, to spider—too slow to be useful to many searchers.
Until recently, the major social networks didn't encourage aggregation of their information with other searchable online data. Twitter increased its search capability with its 2008 purchase of Summize, a startup specializing in mining opinions from Twitter content. Facebook just recently began encouraging its users to open up their data to the outside world as well, albeit not without controversy.
Through its new Real-Time Search service, however, Google has removed the hurdles. Google cut financial deals with a number of social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, and can now include social-media information as it happens, giving it the potential to change greatly both the search experience and the search-optimization experience. It also offers a new potential for spam and related abuse.
How RTS Changes Online Search
RTS appears as a small, scrollable box of search results that are included among the other, typical results to Google searches. As we go to press, Simon Cowell has announced he is leaving American Idol, and a search on his name yields the following RTS results box:
Currently, such boxes appear only for selected searches, with no consistency yet in page placement. (In an earlier test, the box did not appear for a search on "Packers" during the recent NFL Packers vs. Cardinals game, though a search for "Cowboys"—who had played the previous day—did display real-time tweets).
Google will undoubtedly experiment with the algorithm driving the scope and display of this real-time results box. We can expect to see RTS results appearing more frequently and in response to a wider variety of searches as Google observes how users respond to the RTS results.
RTS opens the door for shrewd marketers to exploit the real-time data stream to feature their own content. One easy way is to monitor Google's Hot Searches page, quickly create content on social networks that contains popular search terms listed on the Trends page, and direct readers to unrelated information (selling products, for instance). Google will devise ways to uncover and combat such spam, but the spam will exist nonetheless, as each party counters the other’s moves.
Why Marketers Should Care About RTS and Other Google Actions
RTS changes search in a more important manner, however. As noted above, this is yet another change to the Google search-results landscape that determines whose content is displayed. RTS now joins several other types of results—pay-per-click ads, news stories and press releases, video clips and expanded local-search—in competing with websites for organic ("free") Google results. Together with the other alternative content, RTS reduces the slots available on each page for traditional organic results. This means increased competition for organic positions, which places more importance on optimizing website pages for high Google rankings. But it also offers new exposure for content marketers are developing on the alternative platforms that Google now includes in search results.