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Google has been exploding with innovation this past week at their launch event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
Now when you enter a search in Google, real-time results show up on the search engine results page. According to the Official Google Blog, “Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it’s happening, even if it’s not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn’t know about it beforehand.” Google is currently partnered with Twitter, Myspace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, and Identi.ca, to integrate the live updates of social media into search.
Google pulls the most relevant live updates to determine the results shown after performing a search. Your results show how long ago the update was made and the source of the update. If the most relevant update is from Twitter, the tweet, username, and link in the tweet are shown in the results.
To walk you through, I searched a popular trending topic of the day “tiger woods” to investigate.
As you can see, the “latest results” appear showing Twitter updates referring to “tiger woods”. Google also allows you to narrow down your search to only see the latest results by clicking on the “show options” tab, followed by clicking on “latest”. Here is a screenshot of what this page looks like:
Google has really differentiated itself by being the only search engine that presents real-time search results. Search has come a long way, starting off with just organic searches to now featuring paid search ads and now real-time search. It is important to note, however, that search results shown under the “latest results” will not always be the most relevant searches. For example, spammers can easily post an update onto Twitter and be ranked on the search engine results page, at least for a couple of seconds.
Who would have ever predicted search would get so complex!