I think I first heard Charlene Li say it at last year’s SXSWi in Austin: Web search will continue to move toward real time. Google made it a reality with the announcement of Real Time Search.
Just one of the many tectonic shifts continuing to happen in communications. Everything is integrated and the Google fellows give more detail on their blog than I can ever hope to explain here.
Real time search: it’s exciting. It’s cool. It’s amazing. But I do have 2 gnawing questions:
- How do we develop filters for this amount of information? Unfortunately for some, real productivity just took it in the shorts-again. Just imagine doing a search and getting caught up in the scrolling, real time input from billions of pages of information. Mind boggling.
- Fact checking vs crowdsourcing. Specifically, Google Real Time Search will include information from a myriad of “sources.” As one comment on Mashable wrote: Yahoo! Answers search results are like dog turds in a grassy field of useful search results. So people are already beginning to wonder if there are ways to set domain exclusions to get information from the sources you trust the most and exclude those you don’t.
In an unrelated article on Saturday’s Seattle Times, Ellen Goodman columnists had a comment that I think is particularly relevant to this topic:
Reading about the launch of Real Time Search left me wondering:
- If enough content gets RTd, Diggd, Facebooked, Stumbled and Tumbled will we just have turds polished to a pleasing sheen? Rather than correct nuggets of information, will we just be left with piles of opinion? This is not a criticism of crowdsourcing so please don’t take it that way. Perhaps Clay Shirky or another crowdsourcing expert will address this. Clay?
- Will speed become the metric by which people measure who or what is right? She who tweets first wins! Or is it last? Or most? I don’t know. Maybe a new measure of success will be how good of a bullshit filter you are.
One blogger said that Google real time search levels the field and allows everyone to have their moment in the sun at the top of Google’s search rankings. This same blogger raises interesting questions for what live search does to SEO. Could Google be harming themselves monetarily and cutting off their nose to spite their face, in the race to keep up with Twitter?
The answer is, nobody knows the answer. But if you’ve got some opinions, let’s hear ‘em!
About the BtoBblogger – David Wiggs is founder of Hitch, an agency search consultancy based on the west coast. David earned his B.A in History in Virginia—which makes him a real geek in the advertising world. In the mid 90s he got a break in advertising, which changed his life.
A passionate musician, David is among the few rock drummers who know the entire Rush catalog, note by note. Well, almost. David’s writing can be read here and on his blog Hitch: Connecting Marketing Innovators, but he’d much rather be jamming than writing bios or blog posts.
