On Google Twitter agreement
Google has recently announced on their official blog an agreement to “include their updates in our search results”. This comes just after Microsoft’s Bing adding a beta search for Twitter only. This confirms that both engines move forward and emphasise real time search results.
It seems to me like a natural progression, Google started by getting closer to the timeline search. Early on, Google released two search functionalities:
Google news (September 2002)
and Google blog search (September 2005)
Both of which both show date next to the information displayed – see in yellow:
In May 2006 Google launched Google trends which allows you to see search evolution through time period:
The Mountain View Company went further in August 2008 when it released Insight for Search which allows comparing searches by time ranges and filtering them through type of search, location and category.
Lately, in April 2009, Google labs announced Google news timeline which has an interesting calendar view of the results.
There is only a small difference between a daily search and a real time search, Google and Bing have decided to dive in. It shows their will to give more importance to the opinion of internet users: many individuals’ uses Twitter.
They will have a bit more influence against authoritative sources (online newspaper, influential blogger).
The big challenge for the search engine doesn’t really come from the amount of data to crawl, both search engine have enough resources to do the job, the “tour de force” is to be able to return relevant search results.
How to evaluate the importance of a tweet? In an interesting article from ReadWriteWeb, 3 start-ups leaders working on real time search discuss the challenge behind it.
Google sees Twitter as a good indicator for trends and freshness of the content; I would consider using it more often, linking to your latest news or blog post if you want to rank better for real time search.
Linking the latest blog entry to Twitter sounds like a good idea (for freshness) but what a difference would it make given that real time results won’t differ much to the normal ones?
In fact linking the latest blog entry to Twitter does make a difference to freshness so just that should be a good reason to do so. We have seen the impact of that on our site and we would definitely recommend it.