Google takes on the realtime web with realtime search


At Google's big Search Event today, realtime search took center stage. After announcing partnerships with Twitter and Facebook a little over month ago, Google has put together a system that delivers relevant results from the realtime web. Some users can already test it for themselves by picking "latest" in the "show options panel" on Google.com. Realtime search draws from Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, MySpace, blogs, and even smaller sites like Jaiku and Identi.ca. Google says this adds up to over a billion realtime documents indexed per day. Google will soon start keeping track of realtime trends, but they're likely to be very different from Twitter's trends, which don't usually overlap much with the most popular Google searches at any given time. We'll see how well Google's relevance algorithms apply to realtime search. It sounds like they've got the right idea by, for example, distinguishing between bots and manual postings on Twitter. It'll also be interesting to see how this changes the Search Engine Optimization game, and how people adapt to the challenges of realtime reputation management.

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