I saw a couple of blog posts about Google's realtime search ability and decided to check it out. This week they released a 2:21 video announcing a website for realtime search and some tips on how to use it. The video features a Product Manager and Software Engineer, the folks who know the application best. The problem with the video though is it goes so fast it is difficult to catch all the instructions on how to use the features. I think this is by design. While it is another important step in realtime search, it was not quite ready for primetime in my opinion when I reviewed it. For example, when I went to the YouTube location for the video or copied the link for the new website location: http://google.com/realtime, I got an error, the hateful 404 Not Found message. A couple of days later, it worked. I was able to find a landing page with a call-to-action button that revealed the following location: http://www.google.com/realtime?esrch=RealtimeLaunch::Experiment. Note the term "Experiment" which explains much. More review later; for now watch the video which can be found by clicking here.
After stopping, rewinding, and starting again I was able to take some notes to try it. First if you do a regular Google search, on the left and at the top you can expand your search to media outside of websites which is the generic search criterion. Clicking on "News", "Images", or "Videos" can increase your options for a search. What I hadn't noticed before [or it wasn't there] is the option for "More". This reveals "Books", "Blogs", "Updates", and "Discussions". According to the video, the what's new part is "Updates". For my test I entered the search term "Nashville Flood". Up popped a page of results from Twitter and Facebook from as recent as 28 minutes ago. The neat part of this is the option for time and locations. Since the flood occurred in May I clicked on the "2010" link at the top of the search results and low-and-behold you can see when the most content was created; cool. However when I tried the location feature, I could not get any search results until I went back to the "Now" option and then only when I inserted "Nashville, TN" did I get any success. It did not return any results for "Nearby" or for my city of "Franklin, TN". The last thing new is the option at the bottom of the search results to set up an alert for a search term. While I have established alerts for my brand and those of some clients, this is really easy.
I entered a new search term, "Ground Zero Mosque" and not surprising, there were lots of entries. But if I were really interested in this topic I could have been emailed results: as-it-happens, daily, or once-per-week using the alerts feature. I can think of several good applications for this feature. Bringing up results from social media you get access to content created not only by the professionals but by the public as well. So I can monitor what people say after the Tennessee Titans play a game, the latest on the Little League World Series, any political issue, the latest musings of any political personality (I tried Ann Coulter and Mayor Karl Dean), and even Nashville Weather when thunderstorms and tornados occur. So in spite of the bugs in this offering, I am glad I checked it out and am confident that the geeks at Google will continue to refine this capability going forward. Oh, and I will absolutely use it...
So try this out the next time you are doing a search and website results are not delivering what you had hoped for. And stay tuned to Google as they continue to create new ways to provide you information with a few letters typed and a couple of mouse clicks.
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