
Ask HN: WTF Is The Value of Real-time Search? - sscheper
It seems the only people who care about finding out who said “hotdog” 50 seconds ago are bloggers.<p>Will someone please explain the value with real-time search? And, cut the bullshit. It’s annoying.<p>Seriously, if I wanted tweets in my search results, I’d go to search.twitter.com<p>If I had to explain to my grandpa that he’d need to install a “Webmynd” plugin, which incorporates OneRiot, which contains real-time tweets, he’d literally shit his pants.<p>On serious note, I've not heard one person explain the value of real-time search. Is it the future, or just hype?
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seasoup
Real time search is not for researching a particular topic, that is what
regular search is for. Real time search is used to find out what is happening
in the world right now. For example, one day Pandora stopped playing music. I
checked my connection and it was fine, then I went on twitter and searched for
the word Pandora and BAM! 10 results saying Twitter is down and one results
which said "Twitter was down, back up now." So I reload Pandora, and sure
enough, it was working.

A second time, my wife was stuck in a traffic jam about 1pm. We thought it
might be an accident, but weren't sure, so I searched twitter for the words
"accident" along with her location, and BAM! Not only did I get tweets
describing the accident, but also a link to an obscure, buried news report on
it.

THAT is the beauty of real time search.

~~~
joshuarr
In case you missed it, the difference is that real-time search injects "BAM!"
between your query and the generated results.

~~~
seasoup
No, but my real time search engine that I created to compete with Bing! does.
:)

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patio11
Ordinarily I would be merely skeptical of a business model which a) competes
with Google b) in search advertising c) to technically adept folks d) who
never, ever click on ads.

The fact that it is a type of search which generates _no commercial value_ is
merely icing on the cake.

However, this is not the first time tech influencers have caught the fever for
something which refuses to be monetizable. (Lest we forget, real time search
is a buzzword now coming to the fore to make a basket of the last buzzwords
finally see revenue. Microblogging, etc.)

[P.S. The tone of this post is not what we encourage around here. Skepticism
is fine, please be civil in the future. Listen to Smokey the Bear: Only you
can prevent Reddit.]

~~~
coliveira
There is always some way to monetize web content. We just didn't find yet how
to. It is the same situation of search in 1998. No one knew how to monetize it
correctly. An Adwords algorithm later and we have a multi-billion dollar
company.

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kyro
I used to think that until several months ago when I was on campus and got a
call from a friend saying a gunman was roaming about, armed and ready to
unload. The first thing I did was search for #uci (my uni) on Twitter and got
hundreds of tweets from students around campus who were being herded to back
rooms and put in lock down. Honestly, Twitter was the only place I could go to
find that sort of news. The media picked up on the story about 30 minutes into
it, so I thank Twitter for giving me the heads up to get the hell out of
there, else I could have waited around a bit longer to see what was really
happening, putting myself in a lot of risk. I mean, I probably would've beaten
the gunman to death if he ever approached me, so Twitter really just spared me
the discomfort of a week's worth of sore fists.

~~~
BlueZeniX
Wait, your friend called to give you a heads up and you thank twitter for it?

~~~
pyre
I think he's trying to say that if he hadn't used Twitter to confirm what his
friend was saying, he might have spent time mulling around to see what the big
deal was. In this case, Twitter was the cure for stupidity ("I'm not going to
believe my friend, I'll ignore him!") instead of the generator of it ("I'm
helping start a revolution in Iran from my computer chair! Go activist me!
Yay!").

------
pg
Among other things, it is the fastest source of news. And in news (as the name
suggests), fast is everything.

~~~
axod
Accuracy is also nice. Unfortunately, there's no barrier for entry to tweet,
and people can be easily persuaded to retweet a story even if it's false.

Unless this is solved, we'll just see spam/false news stories all over
twitter, and the service will become useless.

Also I don't think it's the _fastest_ source of news. In the event of 'sudden
shock' news stories, I've usually heard via IM/IRC. The fastest source of news
is word of mouth, phone, webchat/IM, etc.

The other problem is that once you've heard MJ is dead, would you really want
to see 100 bajillion tweets expressing shock at said news. It's very noisy.

~~~
netcan
Douglas Adams 1999 on 'The Internet'

 _Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is.
We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what
we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or
that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you
read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you
hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the
web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards
or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and
why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to
do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see
things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or
in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite.
Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what
we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people
talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we
read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an
actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn
from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot
of ‘us’._

<http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html>

~~~
axod
I think the web solved the issues pretty early on. I know if I go to bbc.co.uk
that I'll get fairly accurate news reporting. Domain names pretty much solve
the identity issue.

How do I know who is accurate and who isn't on twitter? I have no idea who is
a real journalist on there, and who is a 4chan anarchist.

There's no weight - everyones tweets are equal in search, which is a good and
bad thing, but mainly bad IMHO.

~~~
netcan
The point DA was trying to make is that new mediums have these kinds of
problems & we are pretty good at fixing them. For the internet it was a
combination of people/skills developing (eg domain names, brands) & technology
(eg Google) that eventually (pretty quickly when you consider that article is
just a decade old) fixed this.

That doesn't mean real time search will get fixed in the same way or prove to
be useful in the same way. It just means that when any such new medium
(twitter, web, cup of tea) arises, we should expect to find comments like
yours.

------
auston
"Real time search" is just a way to make sure you're not the only one
experiencing a problem...

ie: gmail is down, cops hassling people @ a political rally, recommendations
for parking in Miami Beach, reviews of Movies by real people, etc etc

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chadaustin
As a software developer whose customers happen to also use twitter, I leave
search.twitter.com open all day. Listening to happy customers tweet about our
product is motivating. In addition, it keeps us honest - the negative feedback
is unfiltered.

In short, twitter is a great way to ask "How do people _really_ feel about our
software?"

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tlrobinson
Of course it's not particularly useful if you're searching for "hotdogs"...
unless there happens to be some current event involving hotdogs.

Obviously "real-time search" is all about _real-time_ events. Stuff that's
happened in the last few minutes, hours, days.

I've found myself using search.twitter.com for more and more things. For
example, if I know some new movie trailer just came out, it's probably easier
to find links to it on Twitter search than Google search. Or if some service I
rely on just went down Twitter _will_ know about it before Google search.

------
DanielBMarkham
The key question really is: Is anything interesting happening fast enough that
I want to see it right now?

Analytical asshole man says no -- that's what newspapers and google are for:
the great majority of stuff I care about happened either in the far past (like
more than a day ago) or needs to be edited, filtered, and ranked by an
agrregation site (like this)

But social psychologist man says yes -- people want to chat real-time, not
over a period of minutes even. Rumors get started, grow or die, in a matter of
hours. For some stupid human reason people are still tweeting away happily
about the meal they ate at McDonalds this morning.

And that's not even mentioning the phenomenon of the tens of millions of
bloggers or small etailers who live and die on what's happening on the web
right now, this minute.

You are correct in that there is no rational reason for it. And you have
missed the point entirely if you think it has no value.

BAM! There's your value.

------
fjabre
It's not hype unfortunately.

Even businesses should be worried. Now I need to hire someone full time to
tweet, digg, stumbleupon, and start a linkedin group, facebook group, a couple
of blogs all the while making sure we're in Google's top 10 for relevant
search words.

Whatever happened to build it and they will come? Information overload..? Yes!

~~~
iron_ball
It almost doesn't seem like a real job, does it? But I have a friend who does
internet marketing (mainly through social media and whitehat SEO with minimal
ad buys), and about half his pay is commission. As the mainstream comes to see
the internet more and more as a participatory social space -- something we
nerds have known for years -- that kind of marketing will only become more
important.

------
dacort
It's not the people saying "hotdog", it's the people saying "Oscar Mayer
hotdog". Brands are excited about real-time search because it's the first time
that nonsensical chatter has actually propagated beyond people's lips on to
the Internet where they can monitor it on an ongoing basis. ... Just sayin'

~~~
sscheper
Yea, definitely brands may benefit; however, if we're saying the people who
benefit from this is primarily the Oscar Mayer PR chic, and a couple middle-
men ad networks spying on all our conversations, as the lick their lips on
what shit they can monetize, wouldn't people catch on after a while?

Relevant search is a long-term value because it solves problems (e.g. you
query "how to fix [insert nature of problem]")

Real-time search is basically a voyeuristic tool for brands?

~~~
kapitalx
I'll give you a real life example. I was having some problems with facebook
connection and posting. I searched google and all the posts from a couple of
days back said that facebook had fixed the problem already. But a quick run to
search.twitter.com revealed that many were still having the problem and it
wasn't just me.

I'm sure once you see the results in your actual search results, you might see
more value in it than it seems right away on the surface of it.

------
ivankirigin
There is a great deal of risk in real-time news. If you search for a term many
people are searching for, there is a big spam problem.

Twitter has done little to nothing to fight this spam problem. You could say
the same for any of their spam problems - they have quite a few.

That said, I think many big names are being _extremely_ naive in calling the
innovation "real time". It is open, social, and public. There is actually no
real-time UX in twitter.com - the closest is "N new results" popup on a search
page, requiring a click. I have no idea why election.twitter.com hasn't been
incorporated into search. Actually, I have a very good idea why they take so
long to do *, but I digress.

The point is that it doesn't matter. There is little to no appreciable
difference between real-time and 15 seconds lagged for tweets.

------
jfager
Realtime = Knowing who just trashed my brand, so I can go and fix it before or
while everyone's paying attention to the issue. Including 'happening right
now' sales in my search for an affordable camera. Hearing news that much
sooner than I can hear it today.

Realtime + local = Knowing whether that restaurant I want to go to has seats
available right now. Finding out about the wreck 2 miles down the road, so I
can exit now. Asking if anyone in a several-block radius has a particular part
in stock and getting an answer back quickly.

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jlees
I can't really think of a better way to follow breaking opinions than real-
time search. Sure, if you wait a while you can get news indexing from Google,
but it's the bias that you want. Especially if, say, you're at a
conference/event and want to know what's kicking. We found real-time search
particularly valuable for a month-long comedy festival, as it let opinions
aggregate, yet much of that information (so-and-so is doing a really cool show
this year) wasn't picked up by, say, Google.

------
jasonlbaptiste
I think the value out there right now is significantly higher for businesses
and brands. That's okay and usually how the cycle goes. "computers" were first
for corporations with mainframes, then the "personal computer" came along.

Anything that makes information flow at a significantly faster rate is
valuable. For the average every day person, it needs to be presented in a way
that's simple and makes sense. Twitter describing itself as the pulse of the
internet/world is something I find very powerful.

~~~
sscheper
They also described themselves as being like a flock of birds. Biz and the
gang can get a room and flock all over themselves for all I care, as long as
they're providing clear value and making money.

With Google Wave coming out, that will clearly be providing information at the
fastest rate. Will that be the next _ahem_ wave?

~~~
vladimiroane
I have my doubts about Google Wave. If Twitter is still complicated for some
people to understand (conceptually speaking) I feel not too many will find
great value in the Real-time communication feature of Wave.

I don't think search is the killer app for real-time. Real-time communication
is already popular with sites like Twitter and Facebook where the value is to
see what your friends are doing in real-time. The use-cases for search are not
so obvious right now. And you get this from a guy building a RT conversational
search-engine.

------
netcan
We can't really know at this point. It's just trying to do something useful
with a big pool of information that is a growing part of how we communicate
with each other. People do go to search.twitter.com.

This is more a kind of thing where you say 'there must be something useful we
can do with this' then the kind of thing where say 'this is the problem we are
solving.'

------
joez
Real-time results have a human element to them. It was tweeted by a 'real'
person. The result is what is happening in that person's life and they felt
inclined enough to tweet it. Top search hits are usually professional blogs,
journalist articles or wikipedia. These have lost that personal connection.

------
roundsquare
What you (and some other people) are really saying is that you don't want
real-time search to be the default. I'm not sure it should be or not, but I'd
agree that we need to have a way to disable it lest we get too much noise.

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axod
It allows hipsters to know what is "so hot right now".

For people who can't really think for themselves, they can just search and see
what everyone else thinks.

------
coliveira
Finding people that are interested in your topic, right now. There is
certainly a value for that -- especially if you want to sell something.

------
chrischen
It would be kind of useful for seeing status updates of your friends in real
time.

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kapauldo
real time search _is_ useful and probably monetizeable, but extremely niche. i
have heard plenty of examples, like some described above, where i've felt
"yeah, ok, i could see that." but those times when it might be useful might
occur twice a year, maybe 3 times a year? so the market is incredibly small.
it is most certainly not a threat to google, in my opinion. i am shocked that
oneriot has raised $27M and only have a few hundred thousand hits a month. i
think real time search is way overvalued in terms of growth potential, and
will probably find equilibrium as an occasionally useful niche utility.

