Google adding other social sources to realtime, social efforts evolve
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Google adding other social sources to realtime, social efforts evolve

28th April 2011

When Google first launched realtime search everybody got excited. Finally they picked up on Twitter and showed us real time results. For a short period there was a real hype going around (it even got me a link and quote on the BBC-website). And then it went quiet.

It turned out the realtime results in the middle of a page were mostly ignored by users. Then Google moved the realtime results to a separate page within Google, only showing the ‘real time block’ in special cases. All that time the real time results were mostly results from Twitter and Google’s latests indexed blogs. Now it seems that Google finally is broadening realtime search. A Quora thread and following Techcrunch-post indicate that Google Realtime Search now also shows results from Quora, Gowalla, Me2day, Twitgoo, and possibly others.

The thread-owner, Dan Leveille, noted that if you do a search for “site:quora.com” in the realtime search section you get Quora results from just minutes ago. You get questions, answers and votes.

Facebook is there too, Foursquare isn’t

Next to Quora results we can also find results from for other realtime sites like Gowalla. Gowalla’s data is public so therefore freely accessible for Google. This is not the case with Foursquare, who has its data protected and therefore cannot be found in the results.

Facebook however IS there. And that is at least a bit surprising, since Facebook has a deal with Bing and Google usually doesn’t index Facebook that well. According to the Timeline Facebook is only showing up since this morning, but there are indications that it has been there for a while now.

Something which isn’t there (yet?) either are other picture sites like Twitpic, Mobypicture and YFrog. The Quora post indicates that Plixi is there, but I am not seeing that. If pictures would come in that would be very interesting during real time events.

What does this mean?

Well, it looks like Google finally is getting around to indexing other sites than Twitter and blogs and they finally realized they had to get into this as soon as they can. It is just a small step, but again a step towards the social search engine Google is most probably aiming to become. Step by step, very slowly.

For marketers it means that not just Twitter and blogs can be used. If you play your cards right you can really dominate the real time results from different angles. It will therefore be interesting to see how real time search will behave tomorrow (Friday) during the Royal Wedding in England.

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Written By
Bas van den Beld is an award winning Digital Marketing consultant, trainer and speaker. He is the founder of State of Digital and helps companies develop solid marketing strategies.
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