TR Editors' blog

Google Adds Near Real-Time Results to Search

Will up-to-the-minute posts from the social Web freshen up Google's results?

Erica Naone 12/07/2009

  • 1 Comment

It seems that Google's recent deal with Twitter is already bearing fruit. Today, Google announced that in response to English searches it will now return a "latest results" section that will include posts from Twitter and Friendfeed, along with seconds-old headlines from newspapers and blogs.

It'll be interesting to see how well this content will supplement Google's regular results, which change at a much slower pace. There isn't much room in a 140-character Twitter post to provide the context that search engines typically use to judge relevancy.

In a recent article on Google's forays into real-time search, I also briefly discussed the problem of ranking tweets. The power of Google's search engine lies in its ability to rank the relative importance of different Web pages. But Google's CEO Eric Schmidt asked: "How do you rank the tweets against themselves and against all the other content? That's an example of work that we have done and are continuing to do."

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kstauff

130 Comments

  • 792 Days Ago
  • 12/08/2009

Real time info

Results 1 - 10 of about 30,900,000

That's what you get for a search for the term "climate-gate".  It's unfortunate that a site run by MIT which prides itself on the dissemination of science news has failed utterly to be the source of any of those search hits unless they were left by a commenter.  TR, you should be ashamed.

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