Archive

Today search engine giant Google has revealed that its new real time search feature will be going live in the next few days in the UK, US, India and Australia, with additional countries getting the feature in 2010.

Real time search results are being pulled from a variety of web sites such as Twitter, Yahoo! Answers and various other social media and traditional sources such as news web sites and blogs.

Google released a demo video (see below) of real time search in action on You Tube and a statement regarding the update - "Now, immediately after conducting a search, you'll be able to see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and Friendfeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts that have been published seconds ago, all of these updates are ranked to show the freshest, most relevant results related to what you're looking for."

The main question that we’ve been asked is how will it affect the world of search engine optimisation and search marketing?

In the short term it is very unlikely that this new feature will change much from the point of view of companies using traditional search engine optimisation and pay per click campaigns on Google Adwords. The real time search results only appear for very specific searches that are seen as “Hot Topics” by Google. Therefore it is unlikely that many of a web site’s main keywords and phrases will cause real time results to be displayed.

In the long term, this update was rolled out to ensure that Google remains at the top of the search engine world, and once again Bing-hoo! have got considerable catching up to do if they want to take Google’s place.

At the minute Bing has incorporated Twitter posts into some of its search results but the algorithm it uses at the moment is no where near as sophisticated as Google’s. This new update may force Bing’s hand, making it bring more sources into its Twitter search feature.

Thomas Cole Solutions have spent time researching into this new Google architecture, and are preparing new SEO techniques ready for when it goes live. If you have any queries about this latest development don't hesitate to get in touch, you can drop us a message via the Contact Us Page or call the Techteam on 01254 832815.