

It's No Joke: Real Time Search is a Big Deal. - mbleigh
http://intridea.com/2009/2/9/its-no-joke-real-time-search-is-a-big-deal?blog=company

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thwarted
How much will it take for Google to actually compete in this area,
specifically against twitter and their summize search? Even if they didn't get
access to the firehose, this data is already available via RSS feeds, Google
would just need to crawl the RSS feeds of twitter users, which are (currently)
most likely much fewer in number than the number of web pages that google
crawls per hour, and update a temporal index (because as tweets age, they
cease to remain "real time"), and show these along side their actual search
results. "Your search for 'super bowl' returned this wikipedia article,
espn.com and these currently active conversations". I suggest RSS feeds here
because they are in the right format for extracting metadata about real time
content (datetime, author, text).

In fact, if Google (or another major search engine, but right now only Google
could do it) did change their interface to include "real time" results, it
would encourage the rise and spread of more twitter-like services (because
real time content would be increasingly easier to find). In fact, if Google
included temporal RSS content next to the, for lack of a better term, archival
content, and indexed comment threads also, the real time web would transcend
just being provided by twitter.

Come to think of it, didn't Technorati attempt to do this with blog content,
provide a "conversational pulse of the internet"?

Right now, Google classifies all content they receive, no matter when they
receive it, as archival, and its freshness is only used to increase the
perceived relevancy to float younger entries to the top.

~~~
mbleigh
The problem is that real-time search is a fundamentally different proposition
from archival search. In real-time search what happened in the last 5 minutes
can be more important than everything that has happened before.

Google could certainly add real-time search by gaining access to the firehose
(and that would be pretty cool), but simply running against the RSS feed
wouldn't provide the kind of real-time updates necessary to keep up with
Twitter search.

~~~
thwarted
I think google could fake it enough with twitter RSS feeds and by aggregating
RSS content from other souces, call it "real time" and provide an integrated
platform that piggybacks on what people already use. It doesn't matter that it
can't keep up with the "real time" that twitter provides, people would clammer
to be part of google's real time offering.

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moe
So, O'Reilly had a glitch, everybody and their dog twittered about it, the
author used twitter search to get the info early.

I don't see the Big Deal here anyhow. How about just shooting off an E-Mail to
O'Reilly and _ask_?

~~~
bvttf
What if something happens where there isn't an omniscient authority? Or if the
authority is unresponsive?

~~~
dablya
The cool thing (according to the author) was using twitter search to find too
many submissions accepted for RailConf...

------
wallflower
"we built an API. 2000 pieces of software are capable of sending updates.
Summize was the most important one" @ev #ted

[http://loiclemeur.com/english/2009/02/evan-williams-of-
twitt...](http://loiclemeur.com/english/2009/02/evan-williams-of-twitter-
speaks-at-ted.html)

