MOUNTAIN VIEW (California): Fresh information from blogs, news sites, Twitter and other popular hangouts will now appear in Google’s search results more quickly as the company aims to give people a more comprehensive look at what’s happening on the Web.
The feature, unveiled on Monday, represents Google Inc’s most significant step yet in the field of “real-time” search — a catch phrase for the torrent of information being shared on blogs and the personal pages of social-networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
As those destinations have turned into increasingly popular forums for swapping opinions, offering news tips and highlighting stories, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have been scrambling to retool their search engines so they reel in and showcase real-time data more rapidly.
Google reached a deal in October to blend Twitter updates, or “tweets,” into its results, but hadn’t explained how its system would work until yesterday.
Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, has included a section for tweets since late October. Yahoo! began relying on tweets to point out hot news stories in its results last month.
Twitter’s own search engine doesn’t attempt to identify which tweets are the most relevant to each request; it simply provides a chronological list of the updates containing a specified word or phrase.
Popping up
In Google’s version of real-time search, a section of its main results page will include a capsule that automatically scrolls relevant information within a few seconds after it pops up in the web index.
Normally, a new search request was the only way to see the blog posts, status updates and other information that Google had collected since the previous query.
With the change, a person requesting information about US President Barack Obama, for instance, will see the usual set of static links, photos and video, as well as the capsule with pertinent tweets, blog posts and news stories.
The real-time data won’t show up right away for everyone because it will take Google’s computer centres a few days to make it work everywhere.
Google’s real-time information eventually will be expanded to include some of the chatter on Facebook and MySpace, the world’s two largest social networks.
Not so soon
Although Google announced its partnerships with the sites yesterday, the feeds from Facebook and MySpace won’t start appearing in the real-time results until early next year, said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice-president for search products and user experience.
As with Google’s Twitter alliance, Mayer declined to say how much the company is paying Facebook and MySpace for better access to their users’ musings. The contributions from Facebook and MySpace will be limited to commentary that already can be read by anyone logged into the sites.
Microsoft and Yahoo! have also worked out deals so their visitors can see some Facebook material.
Google is trying to provide better real-time results to maintain its huge lead in search as Microsoft and Yahoo! prepare to team up in a partnership that still needs regulatory approval. Google processes about two-thirds of the search requests worldwide while Yahoo! and Microsoft handle a combined 10%.
“People expect search engines to make all kinds of information available to them,” said Amit Singhal, a Google engineer who oversaw the development of the real-time tool.
Google relies on its dominance of search to drive the bulk of more than US$21bil (RM71.4bil) in advertising sales annually.
More features
Besides introducing real-time search, Google also showed off several other new tools in an auditorium down the block from its Mountain View headquarters.
The company added a voice recognition to process mobile search requests in Japanese on phones running its operating system, Android (Google already does this in English and in Mandarin).
It also provided a preview of a test product, called “Google Goggles,” that will enable people to send a picture taken on a mobile phone and get search results about the photographed object. — AP
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