Real-time Results

Emily Creech - December 22, 2009

There have been a lot of changes within the search industry lately.   One interesting change is that the Google is now incorporating real-time information within their search engine results pages. Google made this announcement earlier this month and these real-time results include tweets from Twitter and information from other sources such as Facebook, blogs, news articles, and more.

To see the real-time results within Google’s search results page, try conducting a search for a keyword that is popular, such as President Obama. Keep in mind that these live updates will not be displayed for every keyword that is searched. Below is an image of the scrolling area on the results page when I conducted a search for President Obama.   This scrolling area updates automatically as you view the page.

As you can imagine, there is way too much information circulating on the web and within social networks to include every bit of relevant information on the search engine results page. Therefore, Google states that they apply “its own measurements to those whose updates appear in real-time results. Retweets and the number of followers a person has factor into Google’s assessment of quality.”  

With this update, there are still a few questions. How useful is this information going to be for searchers?   When people conduct searches in Google, are they really looking for the latest news or conversations about that topic?   How accurate is the information displayed within this scrolling area on the page?   Will it encourage businesses to focus more heavily on online reputation management? How will this impact SEO and the race to get to the top of the page now that this scrolling box takes up some of that real estate on the page?

Here at MoreVisibility we’ve talked about the importance of incorporating social media into online marketing initiatives for quite some time now. With these recent updates, it is even more important than ever.