They have been hinting at it for quite a bit of time now. The murmurs really started with the sandbox launch of Google Caffeine earlier this year. Bing countered with the launch of their new search engine. A subsequent deal with Twitter marked the embrace of social media and its real-time data by both Google and Bing. Google’s new personalized search extended the embrace even further by integrating social media modules.
Today it became official. Google announced the launch of its real-time search.
Google has proven to be a master of relevancy, but their success always relied on the past and web archives. They have always struggled to generate the speed necessary to be relevant in the present, a challenge I discussed at length in a previous article I wrote called The Social Media Shift.
But new information retrieval technologies and social media sources of data are changing the search landscape for Google. They are now able to meet the challenge of real-time speed.
“Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day.”
Their effort relies on data retrieval through new partnerships with social media heavyweights like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Jaiku, to name a few.
