Real-Time Search vs. Traditional Search Basics

Thanks, Lydia. I guess rather than “don’t worry about it”, it’s more a matter of what can even be done to optimize for social/real-time search? I don’t know of an effective way to optimize a site for this channel. I suppose one way to approach real-time search is to stay active in social communities — which is what progressive marketers have likely been doing all along.

Totally agree to the novelty affect of real-time and social search. The online fads today could be gone or corrected tomorrow. But, for the moment, however brief the novelty may be, this immediate information is catching visitor attention. It’s not to be ignored. I disagree with “SEOs are best to watch from the wings” or the “don’t worry about it” approach.

Dave, I hear ya. You just summed up all the complications with real-time search, including the social participation factor and how social/real-time search misses out on a lot of authorities and resources. Thanks for your post on the topic and keeping your SOSG readers in the know. And, of course, thanks for adding to the convo here!

Hiya Virginia, tnx as always for the luvin’!!
It really is an interesting topic.. since writing that a few contenders have contacted me to state their case.. It’s interesting that last year the catch phrase was ‘social search engine’ and this year that’s morphed into the ‘real time’ phenomenon.
Beyond the fact that there is no such thing as ‘real time’ as that’s a misnomer, the problem of authority/value and spam still remains. If any of these so-called ‘search engines’ actually became popular enough to catch spammers attention, how do they intend to deal with them? Google came up with the whole ‘query deserves freshness’ (QDF) to get past the problem of slow link velocity for newer documents… but even they are wary of indexing TOO fast as spam becomes a serious usability issue.
And let’s look at social – are ALL of the authoritative people/resources on the web participating in the social web? I dare say a great many wonderful resources never find their way onto Twitter and as such, a traditional engine has a leg up quality wise (depending what U R looking for).
On and on and on…
Last year there were a crop of social search engines, this year it’s real-time. I submit that this nut won’t be cracked any time soon and by next year it will have a new name/angle… Until more complex systems for ranking/spam are in place, it is nothing more than a novelty…
ya know?

I agree with your skepticism about real-time search, but there is a viable way to do this. You can build a database of blog and social media sources, and rank them based on Pagerank, links, etc. Then assign that rank to any search result from that source. We apply this model to Google Alerts with our free add-on at http://www.alertrank.com. It solves the problem of relevance you point out with alerts.

It depends on what you want to use search results for. If you want to track buzz, then general statistical keyword trends are probably best. If you want to find specific leads for commenting and link building, than the ranking model is most effective in my experience.

“Let’s not forget that showing up in Google’s results doesn’t mean it’s reliable or accurate either – it just took longer to get there. :) ”
Hehe! Good point!

You hit the nail on the head, Virginia. One of the biggest drawbacks to real-time search is the lack of ability to establish accuracy, trust or authority. Aside from filtering the sources being used to populate the results, providing real-time results negates the possibility of offering reliable information consistently.

As we all know, those who spend their lives online are constantly saying SOMETHING…but those “somethings” may or may not be factual, accurate, reliable or truthful. As is the case with traditional search engine results, it is up to the user to weed through the information and determine which results may or may not come from trusted sources. Let’s not forget that showing up in Google’s results doesn’t mean it’s reliable or accurate either – it just took longer to get there. :)