What’s New with Google Real-Time Search Results?

When Google announced its new “Real Time” Search results back in early December, there was a lot of talk around what this would mean to Google SERPs and how it will  impact organic search. In the usual Google fashion, the new enhancement created more speculation then answers.

What most people knew was that “real time” search results was an enhancement to Google Universal, where Google had teamed up with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca; and provided real time search results amongst it’s various other Universal search products. To get an idea of how this works, check out Search Engine Roundtable’s “Google Does Real Time Search: See It For Popeye” blog post; it clearly illustrates what Google’s SERPs look like with real time results.

Moving on from what we all know so far about Google Real Time Search, I wanted to discuss the next steps in Google’s evolution of real time search. What does Google count as current and relevant news; and how will the results be ranked naturally? I might actually have more questions than answers right now, but its food for thought?

Let’s look at what is considered “real time news”… Google states that “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.”  So based on how Google explains the mechanism behind getting ‘real time’ news, the search results should be updated quite frequently on ‘hot topics’ that happen around the world.

For example,  playing around with searches around the Grammy Awards (which happened last week), Google SERPs bring up ’New Results’ at the top, ‘Latest Results for grammy awards’ (see) below) after the 3rd organic result, and ‘Video Results’ at the bottom of the page.

The “Latest results for grammy awards” section of the SERPs includes some interesting updates that reflect both positive and negative Twitter posts as well as latest press releases:

Considering the volume of posts on hot topics (such as the Grammy Awards), companies may have concerns their brand reputation could be tarnished by real time search in the blink of an eye. However, my perspective is that this only emphasizes the need for brands to embrace social media and engage with their consumers and their conversations, so that brand reputation can be managed more effectively. The main point of difference with Google’s Real Time Search results is that it centralises conversations from various social media platforms through one search platform.

Going back to the question about how Google manages to keep its real time search results relevant and only pick up on conversations that are worth displaying –one of Google’s guys, Amit Singhal, mentions that, similar to how Google adapted a page-ranking technology to retrieve relevant web pages in traditional web search, with tweets, the relevance of posts for real time search is built from the ‘reputed followers’. So put it in the words of Amit Singhal.

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely.”
Source: http://www.technologyreview.com

Essentially, I gather that the tweets are valued on how reputable the Tweeple is, based on their followers and followings. It sounds like a popularity vote, but Google goes on to state that its much like how they value link popularity and its not about quantity but more the quality of the followers and followings. On top of all this, Google’s social ranking algorithm uses other filters to ensure its real time search results are as “spam-free” as possible.

In short, the introduction of real-time search to Google was inevitable based on how fast social media is growing; and the way the results are displayed in the “Latest news” section of the SERPs is a reflection of the reputation of the social media user. This ultimately means that brands and individuals need to pay more attention to their customers and the online conversation in conjunction with any other online marketing pursuits, to ensure they really do “Own the Digital Shelf”.

Tags: Google, grammys, real time search