Google ‘real-time’ search

Google 'real-time' search

Google is testing out a new real-time search engine which provides more “real-time” search results. Ths search engine scours the web monitoring tweets and other relevant keyword information and provides it to you in a scrolling update on the search query.

So far I’ve been using it for things like sports scores, monitoring trending topics and such, but part of me scratches my head and thinks, “why not just use http://search.twitter.com” instead of using google’s real time search?

For fun I went ahead and kicked off a search for “Seth Godin” since I knew he just posted an article this morning that I enjoyed titled “your famous” and I wanted to see if it had started indexing yet.

Below are the twitter search results for my query.

Twitter search results for "seth godin"

As you can see the twitter search results display recent tweets about Seth Godin and links to his most recently written article. Cool stuff, this is what I expect to see. If I want to save this search I can do so, and Twitter will notify me of any new tweets that have that term or hashtag.  Now let’s take a look at Google’s ‘real-time’ results displayed on the same search query.

Google 'real-time' search results for "seth godin"

So far it seems like the Google real-time search yields the same results with the exception of a link to a Facebook article which I need to be logged in to view. I do notice that the top of the search results give me some metrics on the density of the search on a timeline. That is somewhat cool and intersting but not necessarily a good enough reason for me to just not use the Twitter Search site.

All in all, I’d have to say I like what I see so far, but not getting overly excited from the new ‘real-time’ search. Maybe someone can comment and let me know what else I can use it for other than searching topics that will be displayed on Twitter’s search?

On a side note I do like the fact if you use the search for something you can add the query to your reader by creating an “alert” at the bottom of the search results. Alerts are a really cool way to stay up on particular topics or subjects that will notify you via email when new content is posted. This also a great way to get new blog ideas or find news to post on your favorite social networks.

I hope that the Google ‘real-time’ results engine expands it’s search into other networks such as digg, reddit etc..

Let me know what you think about this new search engine and maybe some new useful ways to manipulate search.