The Revolution Media Blog

Caroline McGuckian

As we all know, Facebook were the top dog in social networking until Twitter came along and started to steal some of its thunder with the introduction of real time search. So in August, Facebook upped their game with the $50 million purchase of Friend Feed. Many commentators at the time said that the ability of Facebook to improve its real time search offering using Friend Feed's technology, whilst not the fabled ‘Google killer' many are waiting for, was something that would really affect the way users look at search and at least would make the boffins in Mountain View do some serious thinking. Do users want ‘algorithm search' based on how people link to each other like the current model of Google (and, though not executed as well, Bing which also now provides the organic results for Yahoo as well) or a ‘social graph' based on people's relationships and conducted in real time like Twitter and Facebook/Friend Feed?

Google know that real time could be the future and the fact that they hadn't managed to get on top of that was a real concern. Google did launch "Search options" in May, allowing users to filter their search by different types of results (videos, forums, and reviews), by time (recent, past 24 hours, past week, past year), as well as seeing related searches, a "wonder wheel" view, or a timeline view. But that's not "real time search", is it?

As Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that month, "Google has done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per second basis... We will do a good job of things now we have these examples."

And, true to their word, on October 21^st there were some big announcements.

At the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco, the President of Microsoft's Online Services Group, Qi Lu announced the integration of real time Tweets into Bing.  Later, the same day Google's Marissa Mayer announced the same thing for the market leaders as well as a new Google Labs product called "Social Search". This is a new feature that allows the user to see results for queries from people in their social network.  According to Tech Crunch, it is likely that these updates will only be included if the data is open, which would seem to exclude Facebook but not Twitter (as long as the Twitterer doesn't lock their Tweets). This could be huge for Twitter in terms of taking their offering to the next level and who knows, this deal may mean that they may actually make some money now, though CEO Evan Williams told the New York Times that "revenue was not the focus of the deals." Of course, Bing and Google have slightly different algorithms so observing the difference in how they filter useful Tweets for the user will be interesting but it does seem a natural next stage for the search giants to include these updates in their results, just as they currently do for news stories, much to the intransigent chagrin of, for example, Rupert Murdoch or Sly Bailey.

So is this going to drive more people to use Twitter or has their uptake peaked making this just a new way of cluttering up increasingly option heavy search results on Google's once famously clean pages? Are these Tweets, unfairly dismissed as inane chatter by some, going to improve searchers' experience or should Google just be concentrating on improving their ever changing algorithm which is the best we have but by no means perfect? Only time will tell but the outcome may dictate the way search evolves in the foreseeable future.