How Google’s New Realtime Search Works
Google first introduced a real-time search component, which integrated real-time search results into regular search engine result pages (SERPs) in December 2009. Now, Google has announced an upgrade to this feature: Google Realtime Search. The newly revised search feature no longer appears integrated in Google’s typical Web results. Instead, the feature has a homepage of its own at http://www.google.com/realtime. Search queries entered into Google’s Realtime Search culls results from (primarily) Twitter, blog posts, major news sources and updates from other popular social networking sites, like Facebook and Google Buzz, and displays them in a real-time stream.
Calm After the Storm
Social media is new media, and while there are many available solutions to help businesses and consumers better understand what is happening in these new channels and assist with tracking social media, there has still been a great deal of inconsistency in the market. It seems as if Google has paced itself and patiently waited for the major social networking sites and tools to forge ahead, and sort out what works and identify what users prefer. Now, it appears that Google has drawn from the best of these services and incorporated them into one, integrated, multi-faceted feature.
Customizable, location-based searching:
Just as Gowalla and Foursquare have built their services on location-based technology, (Facebook is also now following suit with Facebook Places), Google Realtime Search offers a location-based feature with the ability to customize your search by geography, including Nearby (‘local’ based on proximity) or a custom location of your choosing.
Conversation threads from start to finish:
Google now offers the ability to expand a single tweet and see the conversation that developed around it from the first retweet or reply to the final related tweet. Facebook has done something similar recently with allowing users to see an entire conversation thread right from their news feed, including shared links, Likes on posts and comments. Twitter offers similar functionality with Twitter Search, albeit only displaying tweets dating back up to five days prior. Google Realtime Search shows tweets dating back as far as February 2010.
Real-time alert updates via e-mail:
Users can receive real-time updates on a specific search query they’re interested in. This could potentially be a great social media monitoring tool for social media specialists, marketers and even sales, in order to track conversations surrounding their brand and product.
Social Media Marketing: More Important than Ever
If Google’s doing it, should we all be? In a sense, marketers can’t afford not to have a social media presence after the launch of Google’s Realtime Search because businesses that engage in social media will have a much better chance of being found online via Google’s Realtime Search stream. As a result, we may see even more marketers quickly flooding into the social media space. If anything, companies won’t want to be seen as unresponsive to their customers or prospects who reach out to them in the social media space. New features of Google Realtime Search, like the expandable conversation thread, will introduce clear visibility to the social stream as to whether a company has responded to consumers, or if user feedback has fallen on seemingly deaf ears.
Major players in the social media space, like Twitter and Facebook, have entered into the search space, as well. While Google has stated that they’re working with social media networks to better offer content in it’s real time results, Google’s new Realtime Search appears to be a response to Facebook’s attempt to develop and pioneer the merging of search and social media. If marketers or their executives weren’t convinced of the value in social media marketing before, Google may be a strong enough influencer in this conversation in the market in highlighting social media’s increasingly prominent role in reaching consumers.
Google’s Realtime Search As a Social Media Monitoring Tool
Effectively, Realtime Search provides marketers with free social media monitoring tools for following online conversations about their brand in real-time. The viewable conversation thread of past tweets offers businesses the ability to track Twitter and gather KPIs (key performance indicators) for their company, so as to evaluate whether their number of mentions and retweets have increased, decreased or stayed the same over a specific time period.
Additionally, the graph at the top of the Realtime Search results page provides insight into specific time periods where a company spiked or plummeted in their social media traction. This tool is particularly useful for monitoring the impact of webinars, blog post content and press releases. The added feature allowing users to create e-mail alerts based on keywords can be purposed to measure and monitor negative sentiment through the use of specific keywords (e.g. company name, plus “can’t login” or “system down”), giving businesses insight into their users’ experiences and the ability to provide timely customer support.
Prediction: Google Realtime Search will eventually be integrated into Google Web’s SERPs
Historically, Google has rolled out new search features in a similar fashion to how they’ve currently introduced Realtime Search to users. We saw a comparable pattern with how Google separately rolled out Images, Videos, Maps, News and Shopping and subsequently integrated them into SERPs, and we believe Google Realtime will follow the same trend.
While some might argue that Realtime search is a test and could go away if not successful, Google has a strong track record of introducing new features that evolve into compelling experiences for their users (albeit, Google did recently stop the presses on Google Wave and have announced plans to discontinue it entirely by 2011). We predict Realtime Search will become a permanent Google fixture. Initially, Realtime Search will likely be confined to its current homepage, but following an initial testing period, we predict that realtime results will be pushed out to the main Google search. Just as Google has gradually integrated features like Images and Video into SERPs, we’ll begin to see the same with Realtime Search results. The search engine optimization ranking of Realtime results on the page will likely depend on the currency, popularity & relevance of certain search terms on Twitter and other social media sources at the time of a user’s search.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on our predictions for Google Realtime, as well as whether you think there will be any immediate implications for SEO? Share your thoughts.
