Google Launches Realtime Search

Google have just announced the launch of their real-time search option with a dedicated homepage. Where it was previously an option on the sidebar, you can now find it on the dedicated site Google Realtime , complete with logo!

While this may not be seen as a major step change by Google, as the option was available previously, there’s a couple of nice additions here. Firstly the option to filter results by location, making this a real rival for Twitter’s own search engine, with the added bonus that this will archive results for longer than 7 days. There’s also the conversation view option. This is pretty much the same as offered by Twitter, where you can view threaded conversations to see the context around a conversation on Twitter.

This is also a pretty well-timed offering from Google. As everyone talks about social search, they show they’re serious about the game as well. And I’m sure they’ve left plenty of room on the site to make way for Google Me content!

Timeline View

The real wow-factor of this is the timeline view option. This is returned at the top of the page and allows you to drag along to see results for a particular time in the day. You can then click in and all the tweets etc.. are returned. You can choose to view the timeline by day, month or year and with this Google have unleashed a hugely powerful tool for brands. Much like their Google Trends offering, but this is a more detailed view as you can see the social media conversation around the given time.

As far as I’m concerned, this really is a superior product from Google and it will be interesting to see how widely this is adopted. At the moment we’re getting more and more familiar with social search options on the sites themselves (Twitter, Facebook etc.). This is what I ultimately trust the most and whether Google’s offering can beat that remains to be seen. No doubt this will have a real impact on social search aggregators such as Oneriot, as Google is offering pretty much what they can do, only we intrinsically trust Google’s search offering more. 

Where are the ads?

As much as Google is known for offering great search, they’re also known for monetising it. If you look at the screenshot of Realtime Search above, you’ll notice a distinct lack of ads. I’ve tried a variety of searches and none are returning ads so it’s safe to say that this isn’t something Google is introducing yet. But you can be sure they will. I expect that for now they’ve stayed away from ads in their realtime search, as it’s something that they have to get right. With all the controversy around promoted tweets, Google might be playing it a bit careful here and not mixing the social with the monetisation.

When Google do introduce ads around this, it could become a hugely valuable tool for them. I hope we see something different from Google away from their standard Adwords option that you’re used to seeing. Indeed, this model may not even work for this type of search. Google has previously been able to closely control spend for advertisers, with a daily, weekly or monthly budget. Given that this content is real-time though, Google can’t always gurantee there will be content to serve, so the need for a more insightful advertising model is needed.

I really think I’ll use this tool regularly and hope to see it get bigger and better. The only problem now is that it’s more like a Twitter search engine than a realtime search engine. For me, tweets made up about 90% of the content on searches I ran. But this is Google after all (I haven’t written them off after the Wave incident), so I’d expect big things from this.