Google revamps real-time search

 

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By Stewart Mitchell and Reuters

Posted on 27 Aug 2010 at 08:40

Google has given its live search results a facelift by opening a new site called Google Realtime dedicated to listings that include results from social-network conversations and other live sources.

The new service remains an experiment, but is up and running and enables users to keep track of conversations on sites such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as filter results by location and language.

The results can also be accessed via the left-hand menu of Google’s main search site, under Updates, and the results feature a graph that shows how topics are “trending” on the web.

Google recently built real-time results into its main search results, which included the latest tweets on your chosen search terms. It was part of a growing real-time results war with Microsoft’s Bing, which announced partnerships with Twitter and Facebook back in October.

According to Google, as well as being a useful tool for consumers, Realtime is likely to be used by companies to monitor what people are saying about them or their products. Hollywood studios, for instance, could quickly scan initial comments and snap reviews after a film opens, or a company could check out opinions on a new product on launch day.

The company said it currently had no plans to sell advertising on the Realtime site. "It's a great way to find out what people are saying about something ... right now," product manager Dylan Casey said. "Real time search is a core feature of Google search."

Google decided to hive off the separate site after research showed that enough users wanted to limit their internet trawls to real-time results only. Addressing potential concerns about privacy, Casey added that only publicly available postings are displayed.