Google Adds Near Real-Time Results to Search

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.”