Google Realtime Search Launches Dedicated Home Page and Tools

[tedster]

There's now a dedicated URL for Google's experiment with Realtime Search - http://www.google.com/realtime [google.com]

Play around with it - there are some interesting extra tools and options, including "Conversation View", date filtering, geographic filters and alerts.

<note the link is now updated>

[edited by: tedster at 9:06 pm (utc) on Sep 1, 2010]

[tedster]

Here's the Google Blog post about it, including an instructional video: Google Realtime Search: a new home with new tools [googleblog.blogspot.com]

[fabulousyarn]

This supports the idea that speed may be important, but its activity that is the new juice.

[bhukkel]

there are only twitter results..is realtime not more then just twitter?

[martinibuster]

I did a search for [Topic] + Forum with the expectation of seeing realtime results on forums about that topic. But only received Twitter and Facebook noise.

Forums are social media, too. They are also very timely. It's disappointing to see Twitter noise dominating the results.

[fabulousyarn]

I think its just a matter of time - I think. Twitter is the noisest so it makes sense - I wonder if the fact that the twitter and FB are sourced from one place, whereas forums are from a million places with no central source - and whether it will stay that way.

[HuskyPup]

It's disappointing to see Twitter noise dominating the results.

Oh that is simply horrible, horrible, horrible...take it away and have a re-think please.

[tedster]

I'm finding the Discussions option to be more useful than the default - forums, commments, Yahoo answers - things that are more sensible to read. The domination by Twitter "noise" can be painful, although Buzz is there sometime, as well as Facebook and lots of others once in a while.

[bouncybunny]

Am I the only one getting a 404 from that URL?

[jimbeetle]

Discussions option

Unless I'm seeing something different, isn't that just the new UI button? I'm not getting anything Realtime from that.

[tedster]

Here's the first item on my wish list - I want a button to filter Twitter OUT.

[jimbeetle]

One interesting bit is Google using actual page title for included URLs, not just the shortened URL and not simply the link text used by the user.

Added: Well, most of the time. As soon as I hit submit I started seeing some shortened URLs.

[BillyS]

Here's the first item on my wish list - I want a button to filter Twitter OUT.

Agree. There is too much noise coming from Twitter.

[2oddSox]

I've been using collecta.com for the same thing for some time now. I just put the two (Google and Collecta) side by side for a comparison and there's sweet FA difference from the two results-wise but, IMO, Collecta is much easier on the eye.

[ErnestHemingway]

I will still stick to the old version to find useful information. Great feature though.

[J_RaD]

there are only twitter results..is realtime not more then just twitter?

yea I noticed the same thing, search...99.99% twitter, oh boy this is great *gag*

[johnmoose]

Am I the only one getting a 404 from that URL?

Nope, me too!

[The Shower Scene]

Twitter doesn't have quality control over the content, other than basic heuristic spam catching algorithms. The content on Twitter feels like 99% of it is self-promotional garbage. I don't see the value in this. I don't understand how the engineers at Google did not see how generally useless the information at Twitter is and as a consequence how useless this realtime search would be.

[J_RaD]

maybe they think twitter content is really good and useful ;-)

[idolw]

I am trying to find out a reason to use it. All I am interested in is available in my twitter feed.
Hmm, any ideas?

[fabulousyarn]

I think for me the only reason to use it is to:

keep track of any 'bad' conversations going on about my brand
keep track of any 'good' converstions going on about my brand
keep track of activity of my competitors.

Of course, I have lots of other tools to do this too, but it is interesting.

j

[ergophobe]

>>although Buzz is there sometime

Go figure! My first search, actually, returned,

1. FB
2. Buzz
3-7. Twitter
8. Myspace
9-11. Twitter
12. FB

So Twitter is 2/3 of the results. That's for a search I would actually do. My second search was all Twitter except one Buzz result.

Of course, when I searched on something a bit more mainstream... "Jessica Alba" (first starlet i could think of), I got 100% Twitter.

[randle]

All I get is Facebook and Twitter.

If i'm looking for useful information, thats two places I dont bother going to.

[Lorel]

I can go to twitter and get the same fluff. I hope Google drops this idea.

[ddddd12345]

I think it is a good idea.You can search something that someone just posted.

[httpwebwitch]

This is great. I just filtered by geography, and found a whole bunch of garage sales that are happening today.

[AlyssaS]

There's a very interesting "top links" list on the right hand side for some searches - I presume these are links in tweets that keep being retweeted, as if you click "all mentions" underneath, it brings up all the tweets it was contained in.

try searching "debt", and you get an economist.com article as the "top link". It comes up on some other searches too. I can see all the twitter spammers going crazy getting their followers to retweet their stuff.

[Robert Charlton]

Many degrees of fascination and utility in this, some more potential than actual at the moment. For me, the big feature is the time-line, which makes this a history research tool of sorts. You can skip back and forth in time, move the selection window around, and of course refine your query. You also have a choice of returning images. The results are currently drawn mostly from Twitter, occasionally also from Facebook, with associated images then coming from a variety of sources, including flickr, myspace, twitpic, tweephoto, etc.

I was surprised at the potential I see here, particularly as I'm not a big twitter fan. (I don't personally like that kind of fragmentation of my attention). And yes, unfiltered Twitter quality is pretty questionable. I'm sure Google has in mind various reputation-weighting scenarios for social media, but I don't know that they're here yet.

Over time, real time search might become a tool for studying the propagation of trends, the consequences of events, the sources of rumor, and the nature of the social fabric. (It's also useful, as noted, for finding yard sales and the location of taco trucks). Most likely, the data will be more valuable for computer analysis than for manual analysis... but it's unlikely we'll get access to the data at the bulk level. There are of course sinister implications as well as benign academic uses.

The scrolling display reminds me of the constantly scrolling display of real time world searches at the Googleplex. It's a fascinating window into humanity. You watch it for a while, then shake your head in amusement or astonishment or dismay, and eventually turn to other things. Or, like Google, you can study it seriously.

There's a similar fascination here, focusing on the social data stream one query at a time, with some queries much more interesting than others. I'd like to see the sources broadened and weighted, and the refinement tools enhanced. Ultimately, I'm sure we'll get something like Google Realtime Trends, which will give us some smoothed out data for top searches.

I'd like to see Google take realtime results off the regular serps pages unless they're especially compelling (as with a breaking news story), and develop this tool further.

[tedster]

I've also seen results from Yahoo Answers and even second-tier sites like ChaCha. Yes, the Twitter stream is strong, especially on the default search, but there is more potential here than that.

There are a number of business offerings these days focused on social media listening. For those services that are exclusively focused on a listening service - meaning it's the entirety of their offering - Google's Realtime Search should be a wake-up call.

[Robert Charlton]

Note this thread from about a month ago in the Google Business forum, which bears some relationship to Realtime Search data and what can be done with it.

Google & CIA Invest in Future of Web Monitoring
http://www.webmasterworld.com/goog/4178684.htm [webmasterworld.com]

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine "goes beyond search" by "looking at the 'invisible links' between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events."

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online "momentum" for any given event.

Again, we're not likely to get bulk data that will enable us to do this kind of analysis.

The videos I link to in that thread are instructive, albeit also creepy. (Perhaps whoever scored the music track has a sense of irony, or perhaps that's the company's self-image. It's often hard to say).