Charticle: The Battle for Real-Time Search

Ann Smarty at ProductiveWise sizes up the various options for tapping into real-time search - Twitter, Facebook, Google and Friendfeed. Personally, I am finding Google's new search options to be outstanding - an addicting.

11 comments

Oct 07, 2009

Anthony Scaffeo said...

steve u have FB+FF vs Google vs Twitter. It doesnt compute to me. Is Google Still old news? How will they become instant?

Oct 07, 2009

Steve Rubel said...

@Anthony, the chart isn't mine. Have you tried the search options on Google? They're quite good and getting better everyday.

Oct 07, 2009

Kevin Skobac said...

isn't google's search now much faster than 1 hour? also, how do companies that are targeting the realtime search space such as oneriot.com stack up?

Oct 07, 2009

Norbert Mayer-Wittmann said...

To me, FriendFeed, FaceBook and Google are just brand names.

Twitter is an English word -- that's significantly different. But the word doesn't mean anything specific, and the management of twitter is in fact ruining what "intellectual capital" that word used to add to twitter.com -- many sites have been run into the ground this way (so the twitter management's "epic fail" -- its "dropping the ball" -- is nothing new).

Facebook.com seems to be managed FAR BETTER than twitter.com (in case anyone feels they're competitors) -- but all 4 of the sites mentioned have very little or in fact no sense of community whatsoever. They are all brand name / mainstream media -- and therefore shouldn't be very interesting to advertisers seeking to reach targeted audiences (but that doesn't necessarily mean that many advertisers would refrain from wasting a lot of money advertising in these venues -- many advertisers may very well be just as clueless as most of the users of these services).

:) nmw

Oct 07, 2009

Jérôme F. said...

Google can be instant too: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/even-more-recent-google-search-results.html (up to one second).

Actually, you wrote a post about that trick http://www.steverubel.com/google-real-time-search-bookmarklet :)

Oct 07, 2009

Norbert Mayer-Wittmann said...

... oh -- and the entire web is in fact real-time. The primary issue is that many users have become so dependent on Google's services (which are FAR slower than 1 hour -- that's a VERY suspicious "statistic" IMHO) are SO LAGGED (more like weeks or months -- if results show up at all) that they have forgotten this simple fact.

All of the interest in "social" is primarily a sign of DISINTEREST in Google -- in other words: it shows how BAD Google is -- what an epic failure at "organizing all the web's information" (which is, of course, a ludicrously conceited goal in the first place).

The main people who should be worried are: 1. people invested in Google and 2. advertisers who think that any of their ad spend will actually have a significant impact on the bottom line. I might also add that the users/consumers should be worried how badly they're being misinformed, but I guess that many of these people are so accustomed to being poorly informed by mass media that they probably wouldn't be terribly upset about it anyways. (sad but true?)

Oct 07, 2009

Radco said...

The real issue in real time search is how much spam and trivia. Page ranking with back links doesn't work since there aren't back links to new content. So you need different algorithms and filtering. Check out Line Spout for high quality real time search.

Oct 08, 2009

Vinko T. said...

Steve, isn't it that FF only contains contents from feeds that FF users added to their respective accounts? So, a search in FF may not return a complete view of any one subject within the given platform (ie. Twitter, etc.). Am I mistaken?

I believe in the near future, when some sort of integration between the FF and FB platforms, will offer a competitive position for FaceBook against Google.

Oct 08, 2009

Steve Rubel said...

@Vinko you have that right.

Oct 09, 2009

Charles Baldwin said...

I'm still uncertain why "real-time" search has become such a buzzword and so important to benchmarking the abilities of a search engine. The function of a search engine is to search. Hopefully, this search has access to a large amount of data that is extremely varied. On this point, all but Google fail. What can be gleaned from Facebook and Friendfeed sources is limited and self-limited. I'll have to let it suffice to say that Twitter contains so much noise I feel it's fairly useless as a resource. Turning back to Google, for a moment, their largest problem has not been the amount of data they collect, but the frustratingly limited way it's been possible to search it. If my search is too specific, I end up with nothing. If it's general enough, I end with some unreasonable number of hits. Google, though popular, for quite sometime has been an abysmal search engine. I am very glad to see that changing recently.

As far as the necessity for "real-time" searches, I believe that by monitoring a particular topic or discussion of a brand might be helpful in a larger perspective, but responding to such information "real-time" can be, at best, reactionary. On the other hand, I suppose I can understand the value of more immediate changes in search rankings, brand buzz, and such for the SEO gurus. That, however, is a very different topic.

Oct 09, 2009