Real-time Search Results in Action
Real-time search has been available on Google since the end of last year, but it wasn’t until today when my colleague in Costa Rica instant messaged me “(5:18:40 PM) just had an earthquake, went running out of the house” that I really used it. Immediately I jumped on Twitter and searched “costa rica earthquake” and here is what I saw:
Then I checked Google, and found updates about the earthquake from Twitter and FriendFeed at the top of the “Latest” results as well.
You can see from the above picture that the first non-tweet search result does not have any information about the quake yet, so to find more information I clicked “Updates” (results below).
For this particular event Twitter was the most popular and active source. Since its launch in last December, Google has started showing Tweets, Facebook fan (or like) page updates, MySpace updates, and Google Buzz updates among others (complete list below) to its search audience. Whichever updates are most relevant and qualified appear in chronological order. The other sources are
- Twitter tweets
- Google News links
- Google Blog Search links
- Newly created web pages
- Freshly updated web pages
- FriendFeed updates
- Jaiku updates
- Identi.ca updates
- TwitArmy updates
- Google Buzz posts
- MySpace updates
- Facebook fan page updates
Another nice touch to the “Updates” page is the timeline on top of the search results. It shows the amount of searches made at any given time in bar graph form (see picture below). You can also select time slots and view the updates that were made in that time. It was easy to go to the first indication of activity on the timeline and pinpoint when this quake happened. I went back to Twitter to confirm if the first tweet recorded on Google was the same on Twitter, and found out that it was not nearly as easy as it was in Google. I had to click the “more” button on the bottom of the last visible tweet at least 15 times before I finally saw the same tweet that was in Google. It was in fact the first tweet about this earthquake on Twitter as well. That shows that these real-time search results are accurate, and comprehensive.
