What is Google Real-Time Search, and what does it mean to me?

It's been talked about for months, or rather the rumours and speculation were. It was rolled out on Google.com on the 7th December 2009 (most notiblly for 'Tiger Woods') among a few key search terms, and then a couple of weeks ago we finally saw it appear on Google.co.uk

If you haven't seen Google's real-time search yet, it's an addition to the main search results which includes results from sites such as twitter, blogs and news sites. The key part though is the fact that these are real time results displayed in a scrolling frame. Which constantly updates.

In the case of the term 'Tiger Woods' on Google.com live results can be seen in the middle of the first page of results. When news hit of Tiger's car crash, and the media field day that followed the speculation spread like wildfire. This could be seen instantly via the constant stream of tweets in real-time search. As time passed (very little time actually) news sites and blogs started publishing more Tiger Woods stories, which were also included in the stream. The results have now developed into a scattered mix of news articles, tweets and blog posts, which as you would expect vary in relevancy.
So what does Real-Time Search mean to your business? At this stage it would be easy to dismiss these results as of little consiquence to your online presence, especially as the results usually appear towards the lower end of the page below normal results, news, maps and such like. It's important to bare in mind that these results have only been rolled out as a trial so far and are likely to be much more prominent shortly. With this in mind, try imagining the 'real world' equivelant of these results...

Your website is your shop. Your Google search listing for your brand term is your front door, with the rest of the results page being the street surrounding your shop. The real-time search results frame is effectively a group of people standing on your street (outside your front door) shouting about your shop/brand. This is where things start to seem very real, the 'chatter' can be good, or bad, or anywhere inbetween which in turn could make the difference between someone entering your shop, or moving on to a competitor.

So, we've established that real-time search has the potential to effect your business, but what can you do about it? The obvious approach could be to try populating these results yourself by tweeting, releasing news articles and producing other media that is included in the results. When you think that these results can be updated every few seconds it soon becomes clear the massive resources this would take, making it unviable to be a successful strategy. Instead, the source of such results should be considered and how these can be influenced, remember this chatter has existed for some time now, the only difference is that Google has made it more visable.

So to break real-time search down further we need to look at what it actually consists of and where it comes from:

• Twitter - The most talked contributor are Tweets, at present these prove by far the most difficult element for businesses to influence and control. Of course tweets can be made by the company itself, which may even be re-tweeted to further increase volume. But the sheer expanse of twitter's user base could easily swamp such an attempt, which if negitive could make the attempts feel futile.
• Blog Articles – These are often the next medium to feature breaking stories, real-time search has seen blog articles pulled in from various locations. As with news articles these appear to be weighted to some degree by the quality of the source. As Google develops this feature this filtering should improve to provide what they deem the most relevant results.
• News Articles – In comparison to the other mediums mentioned, new providers are often slow to produce content on breaking stories, and by their nature are less in quantity. However when they are released Google appears to be weighting these highly. This makes sense as you would expect (or hope) a news provider to hold more authority that your average tweeter. As previously mentioned though, the sheer volume of other mediums (specifically twitter) have the potential to overwhelm in the heat of a popular story.

The real-time search contributors above are by no means comprehensive, and no doubt Google will expand on these as they develop further. But the one thing they do all have in common is that none of this is new. All of these elements should already be addressed by an effective Online Marketing or a Social Media Strategy.

The bottom line is that you need not necessarily have to worry about real-time search, as with many elements of online marketing, if you get the basics right, engage with customers and provide them with genuine value real-time search will just provide another window to this.

Geoff Kennedy