Earlier this week, Google announced it had released new real-time search functionality to its search results. This new feature embeds the latest real-time results right into the results page for the given query.
(click on the thumbnails for larger images)
The real-time data is primarily from the Twitter stream — the massive stream of comments from tweetland is whittled down to include only those tweets related to the larger search query. If you try a search for a term like “up in the air” you will see the real time results embedded in the page (you’ll probably have to scroll down).
What I’ve found in early testing is that the relevancy for the real time results is fairly decent. In the test for “up in the air” there was a result from a Washington DC news site that was included. This result appears to be served up primarily on the basis of time sensitivity and not related to the topic I searched for.
Another cool feature of real time search is the update page. The update option is found in the left navigation when the search options are expanded. Choosing updates displays only the real time results.
What you may not know is that you can use at least three cool features in updates:
Search with RT@username, like RT@mattcutts – See how frequently a specific user’s tweet was re-tweeted. This could be used to determine how influential a specific user is within Twitter.
Search with a specific hashtag, example: nba #nba to see only the queries related to that term with the hashtag.
Search with -twitter (example: best buy -twitter) to see all of the real time results excluding Twitter. This test resulted only in content from friendfeed.
Unfortunately, Google does not include any count as far as the number of results found for real-time search results, so there’s really no way of knowing the volume of real-time results specific to your query when it is performed. These tools still have some value; for example you can get a feel for what content is popular in Twitter related to your search term. You could use it to search for near real-time photos related to your search query. There are a lot of applications here. I’d be happy to hear your ideas in the comments!
