Tue 8th of December, filed under Social Media
Real-time search boosts social media
Social media will gain much greater prominence online after Google launched its long-awaited real-time search function.
Over the next few days, the world's largest search engine is rolling out an English language version of real-time search for users worldwide. Social media results appear on the main search engine results pages under a heading marked 'latest results'. Users can also click on this heading to drill down into a page devoted exclusively to real-time search results.
In both cases, the feeds are updated dynamically so that new, highly relevant results appear at the top and older results are gradually pushed downwards. Options are included to scroll down and pause the real-time search feed, meaning users can keep track of a particularly important message. But the feature cannot be disabled or removed altogether.
Twitter, Facebook and MySpace on real-time search
Real-time search results are drawn from a range of sources. Google has teamed up with micro-blogging services Twitter, Jaiku and Identi.ca and social media aggregator FriendFeed to provide real-time content. And it has also announced that Facebook and MySpace will be incorporated in the near future – although only public Facebook pages are covered, not status updates and multimedia files contained on private profiles.
Nevertheless, Google fellow Amit Singhal has suggested that real-time search functionality is an important breakthrough. "As we've written before, search is still an unsolved problem and we're committed to making it faster and easier for people to access a greater diversity of information, delivered in real-time, from across the web," he said. "I'm tremendously excited about these significant new real-time search features."
Posted by Richard Frost
