Archive

Once again, the search engine giant Google has picked up the pace with regards to real-time search, by launching a separate, dedicated site for it’s real-time search engine.

Google has been integrating real time information into the body of it’s search results since December 2009, after they negotiated a deal with social media companies such as Twitter, Facebook & Myspace.

This meant that when a user searches for a particular topic on Google, they may receive real time results from a variety of social media if the topic is a ‘hot topic’.

However, the Mountain View company has now developed a dedicated site to host it’s real time search engine, which spiders through the internet for the most up-to-date search results.

Writing on the search engine’s blog, Dylan Casey (Google’s product manager) said: “On the new homepage you'll find some great tools to help you refine and understand your results.”

“First, you can use geographic refinements to find updates and news near you, or in a region you specify. So if you're travelling to Los Angeles this summer, you can check out tweets from Angelenos to get ideas for activities happening right where you are.”

“In addition, we’ve added a conversations view, making it easy to follow a discussion on the real-time web. Often a single tweet sparks a larger conversation of re-tweets and other replies, but to put it together you have to click through a bunch of links and figure it out yourself. With the new ‘full conversation’ feature, you can browse the entire conversation in a single glance. We organise the tweets from oldest to newest and indent so you quickly see how the conversation developed.”

“Finally, we’ve also added updates content to Google Alerts, making it easy to stay informed about a topic of your choosing. Now you can create an alert specifically for “updates” to get an email the moment your topic appears on Twitter or other short-form services. Or, if you want to manage your email volume, you can set alerts to email you once per day or week.”

On top of this major update Google was recently spotted testing their real time results pages, which could be the next major update for the search engine as it strives to deliver the relevant results in real time.

Google’s real-time search engine can be accessed here: Google Real-Time

… and the video of Google testing their real-time results pages can be seen below.