What Is Real Time Search?

22/01/2010

By Andy Betts, Managing Consultant, DBD Media

With the announcements at the end of last year that Bing and Google have linked partnerships with social networking and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, it is inevitable that real time search will rise in importance to offer companies an important new channel through which to communicate their marketing messages to online audiences.


What Is Real Time Search?

By incorporating live social media feeds into the natural search results, Google and Bing can display up to the minute "live' search results. Instead of indexing existing web content, this allows the...

...search engines to display results on topics within seconds of when they are published or written on Twitter and other social media networks - in real time.

There is still debate on relevancy of results and privacy. Real time search does provide people with the most comprehensive and relevant search results, however, Twitter has a privacy element to it (what I tweet is for my followers). By integrating real time results, search engines now publish that information globally.


What Will The Impact Of Real Time Search Have On My Business?

Previously websites needed to rely on search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to ensure that their pages ranked in high positions in the natural search results for relevant queries. Real time search changes this, and changes the way the natural search results are presented. Whereas in the past a website may have ranked at position 1 in the [n]natural search results[/b], now the top positions may well be populated by, live tweets, public Facebook pages, FriendFeed, news articles, or map listings.

To ensure that they maintain visibility in the search results, website owners need to ensure that they have an integrated social media and search strategy. With the top... continued on page two >

 

 

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