Google has once again stepped up its game in a race it was already winning – the search engine superpower now offers real-time search, bringing in results from the web as they happen. Switch your search options to “Latest” to view Tweets, blogs, news, and other web content with the promise of relevant content that Google has always offered. The announcement from the official Google blog states:
We’re introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.
Real-time search isn’t new to the Internet though; Twitter has been offering it since late 2008. Facebook caught on earlier this year, offering some advantages since its searches cover any content posted by users, including links, status updates, videos, photos, and notes. FriendFeed includes updates from a variety of networks, and Bing recently signed deals with both Twitter and Facebook to include their content in search results too. But despite the best efforts of its competitors, combining real-time search with the most powerful search engine on the web gives Google a tremendous advantage – and you can guarantee Google will find a way to innovate the feature in some way to stay ahead of the rest.
So what does real-time search mean for marketing and advertising? Social media is now more important than ever before, thanks to word of mouth publicity that happens through various networks. Now that Google harvests content from the web as it happens, reviews and opinions from around the world are shared and accessed instantly. This is great if you’re offering a product or service getting rave reviews, because the publicity could go viral and do great things for business. On the other hand, bad publicity could be devastating just as quickly. The most important thing is to monitor your Internet presence and be aware of what the public has to say, and to deal with bad reviews before millions of Internet users have been influenced. Fortunately, real-time search makes these tasks easier than ever before.
Check out Google’s video below for more information on real-time search:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRkYmx4A9Do[/youtube]
