Blogs by Magic

Thoughts & ideas from a digital magician.

Googling in real-time

Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we'll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.
via googleblog.blogspot.com

Google has now officially joined the real-time web bandwagon. Starting today, they are going to be integrating sites like Twitter and Facebook into search results. The key word that they use in describing their approach to real-time search is this: relevance.

And I hope it works, because right now that's the problem – search on Twitter and Facebook usually returns irrelevant nonsense. When you go onto Twitter, trending topics is filled with spam. Is Google going to start injecting spam into search results? I hope not.

If you look at the "Hot Topics" on Google Trends, and click on any one of them you'll see tweets start showing up in-line and under other search results. For the most part, they seem pretty irrelevant to me. Looking at it now, it seems like it's just keyword matching. I would presume that, as Facebook becomes more open, Google will start indexing Facebook status updates and user photos as well.

I could be proven wrong, but I'm not sure that social media has a place when running everyday search queries. For the most part, the more interesting part of social media is finding out what's relevant to you – based on your relationships to other people – not necessarily the keywords you searched for. And when I want to ping the Twitterverse with a question and get a response, I don't do that through search. I do that by actually sending out a tweet and seeing who picks it up.

Perhaps the future of social search will work like this: I go to Google and type in a search term. That query gets posted to my Twitter feed automatically. As users reply to me, these are the tweets show up in the search search results. It's this level of personalization that seems to be missing in Google's current real-time web approach, and why they seem to fall short with their goal of brining relevance to social media.

Filed under  //

Comments [0]

Searching through everything

I’ve been playing around with Google’s Quick Search Box (or QSB) for Mac a lot this week. For those who don’t know, QSB is a mix between Spotlight and Quicksilver. It provides the same search capabilities as Spotlight, with some added application launching functionality (albeit not nearly as much as Quicksilver). What it does do better is integrate the web, and allow you to search through things like Google Docs in an instant. It’s incredibly fast when you consider how much it has to search through. Eventually, they plan to include support for Twitter, Facebook and others. It would be quite remarkable to have a single search tool that can index your entire footprint, both online and locally.

QSB is a lot like Mozilla Ubiquity for the desktop. Hopefully they will open it up a bit and allow others to develop actions for it.  This would allow it can do a more than simple searching and application launching and overcome Ubiquity’s biggest limitation – access to system functions and the filesystem. This is why Ubiquity can’t do things like access your iTunes library or execute commands from other programs. QSB has the potential to do all of these things and more.

For the time being, I think I’m going to start using QSB instead of Spotlight. It works better, faster and lets me search through Google Docs, which is something I’ve been using a lot more lately. All it needs to be able to do now is search through Gmail. Surprisingly missing, but probably not for long. I’m also curious to see how Google’s ad platform evolves as they start to see, not only all your Tweets and Facebook posts, but how you might be searching and executing applications and files on your own machine.

Filed under  //

Comments [0]