Real time search is getting to be a quite the buzzphrase in recent months. But what is it really?  The simplest and most familiar example is Twitter’s search feature, which provides almost instantaneous access to anyone’s tweets.  But given the recent implementations by the major search players, Google and Microsoft’s Bing, there appears to be some disagreement on the finer points. This article by Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land analyzes the concept in a really nice way that I tend to agree with. It also delves into a lot of other specialized tools for real time search, but I’ll stick to the big names here (Twitter, Google, and Bing). Sullivan maintains that real time search is only truly “real time” when its sources come from microblogging services that provide a real time feed of the activity on their networks. For the most part right now, that means Twitter. There is just no single place for search engines to constantly look for updates from news sites or long-format blogs. So they have to depend on being alerted to updates by such sites, or actively crawling around the entire internet looking for new content. Neither of which is reliably real time in the up-to-the-second way that Twitter is.

Twitter of course has its own search feature. Bing and Google’s real time search features have access to what’s known as the Twitter “firehose,” which is the live stream of all tweets that Twitter is providing to certain third party services like those search engines. For now, Twitter’s own search feature appears to provide the fastest updates of new tweets. Google and Bing seem to have a bit of a lag, and this is possibly due to the fact that they are preprocessing tweets in an attempt to filter out duplicates and spam. As far as I can gather, Twitter’s search does not do any filtering. And spam can be a real problem. Among many other nefarious strategies, people can set up programs that watch for trending topics on Twitter, then make them automatically post fake tweets about those topics. These tweets can have disguised links to sites that may download malicious software to your computer. And despite Bing and Google’s efforts to filter out spam, it will always be a bit of a cat and mouse game, and is definitely not currently perfect.

Bing and Google have quite different approaches to real time search, as I hinted at above. Bing seems to take more of a purist approach, separating their Twitter search feature entirely from regular web search. Bing currently also only gets its real time results from the Twitter firehose. Google on the other hand will automatically include real time search results for keywords that have a lot of recent activity. And beyond that, they mix in all kinds of content in that automatic view, which they call “Latest Results”. You will likely see tweets there, along with news and blog results, or even any old web page with new content that Google recently became aware of. However, you can filter down to just “Updates” which for now means Twitter and a few other similar microblogging services like FriendFeed. See the article by our Tom Lynch for more detail on how that works.

Google and Bing both recently made deals to gain access to Facebook updates. It is unclear how Microsoft will integrate them into their real time search feature, since it will certainly have to be rebranded from “Bing Twitter” to something else more generic. Google’s future integration of Facebook updates seems more natural. But interestingly, their deal with Facebook only gives them access to updates from Facebook “Pages,” not individual personal accounts. Microsoft’s deal will allow them to include any Facebook updates marked as visible to “Everyone,” which seems a clear advantage.

As you can tell, this is quite an evolving field. Google and Microsoft will continue their arms race, and other dark horse innovators will crop up on the sidelines. So look for more interesting developments to come.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Social Media, Technology, Web, ePiphany Featured Story