What is Real Time & Social Search?

Posted on | November 16, 2009 | No Comments

Twitter, Google & Bing – What is Real Time & Social Search?

Real time search and social search are two different things. The main things that make them different are the timeliness of the information they provide and the sources from which they are obtained.  Twitter, Google, and Bing respectively have their own ways of providing the ability to run either one or both of these types of searches.

One example of a social search engine is Google’s Social Search. It doesn’t include results from Twitter and was actually developed before Google’s new deal with Twitter was even conceived. The way it works is that Google looks at contacts and services that are defined in Gmail, Google Reader, Google Chat, and the user’s Google Profile to find out about their social network. For example, If you list social networking sites such as Twitter, Flickr, and Digg in your Google Profile then Google will be able to pole those sites to find out who you are connected to in order to build your social circle.

Google mines the links of your social circle members in order to figure out what information is relevant to your search by using their normal link ranking algorithm. For example, if you have a friend on Twitter and they link to their blog and the blog links to their Flickr account, then Google can analyze those links and return links to the content that is relevant to your search.

Real time search means looking through material that literally is published in real time. In other words, material where there’s practically no delay between composition and publishing. For example, a person uses Twitter to “tweet” about an event that they are currently experiencing or they take a picture and publish it immediately for the world to see.

Publishing in real time involves a process called “micro blogging”, which is where an event is experienced and the person experiencing the event quickly types a description or observation into a box and submits it immediately. Some micro blogging examples are tweeting on Twitter, issuing status updates on Facebook, or submitting posts to FriendFeed.

Twitter is the real time publishing leader and is considered to be the micro blogging service. So much material is published by so many people so quickly through Twitter that real time search is largely synonymous with searching tweets. In order for a search engine to successfully index all of the real time data that streams through Twitter they need access to the actual “fire hose” data stream. Google and Bing have struck deals with Twitter to receive this fire hose data so that they can integrate it and index it as part of their normal search results.

Since Google and Bing have both struck deals with Twitter for real time search and have already either constructed their own social search algorithms or in Bing’s case struck a deal with Facebook, we should see the two search engines become much more powerful. Internet search will become a method of obtaining information that is more relevant since information can be obtained in real time and will mostly come from people that we already know and trust. It will be very interesting to see how powerful and influential Internet search might one day become. It might even gain enough strength and exposure to effectively phase out some of the news, entertainment, advertising, and information sources that most of us current use on a daily basis.

Category: Engine News

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