Anyone who’s been trying to keep up with how search engine users find internet content had to be blown away by the announcement of Google’s Real-Time search function.
Today a representative of Google stated, “relevance has become the critical factor.” My question is what was it before? It’s always been relevance that Google used to index the internet, right? Well, relevance and a website’s ranking according to a super top secret formula creating an entire industry attempting to “crack the code” as it were.
Assume for a second that it is even possible for any search engine to be able to spider the entire internet on a real time basis. If that is true then anyone with a blog has the possibility of thousands of views from a speedy post about a current trend. In the past, trending can give even a poorly Google ranked blog a shot at some internet traffic. If you were willing to get up early and hit Google/trends you could often predict something that would peak later in the day and an early morning blog post might show up by the time it peaked. When I wrote for paying article sites, they tended to rank higher and would receive more traffic than my blog posts with the same keywords.
Google Real-Time, according to Google will provide real time information from tweets, blog posts and sources like MySpace and Facebook. I guess I missed something but aren’t tweets usually just spam? Why would anyone searching for “relevant” information want to see what Bobby Joe in Tucson thinks about Tiger Woods affair and bothered to tweet or post on his MySpace page? In order to actually be in “real time” Google must be tapping into various RSS feeds to collect this information. I cannot see how the information could come in real time from spiders. But then again I’m not an engineer – I’m just a speculator. For Google’s real time searching, are there sites favored over others? This I will like to see.
While my mind is still boggled by the full array of implications raised by this search function, I think it could actually benefit bloggers and article writers willing to work fast and hone their trend prediction skills. I guess we’ll see.
