Facebook’s previously announced realtime engine has been released, coverage from Mashable:
Fast forward to today: Facebook just announced that it is rolling out the new Facebook search. With realtime search and FriendFeed
in its pocket, Facebook is gunning directly for Twitter
.
Also for Mashable, a story on Google’s “major revision” of its engine. I plan to dig into this one, as I sense it has a lot to do with crossing the infrastructure chasm to real time:
Secretly, they’ve been working on a new project:the next generation of Google Search. This isn’t just some minor upgrade, but an entire new infrastructure for the world’s largest search engine. In other words: it’s a new version of Google.
The project’s still under construction, but Google’s now confident enough in the new version of its search engine that it has released the development version for public consumption.
In other words: it’s a new version of Google.
Is that like New Coke? 😉
John, I wrote something last night on why I think this is not only big news but a significant move for Facebook (up) and Twitter (oops): http://noccrit.com/steveblog/2009/08/facebook-buys-friendfeed/.
As for Google II, what am I missing? It looks very similar to Google I. Is this a Pete Townshend moment: “Meet the new search; same as the old search”? 🙂
It’s too early to understand the full implications of this update, but it could be compared (at this stage) to the Bigdaddy update Google rolled out from December 2005 through March 2006.
That update ALSO focused on infrastructure. It was the one where they introduced a second crawler for their Supplemental Results Index and apparently divided the Web into sites that are most likely to be seen (Main Web Search) and least likely to be seen (Supplemental Index).
In 2007 Google hid the “Supplemental Result” tag but they did not do away with the Supplemental Index.
People are speculating that this new infrastructure may be positioned to take on real-time indexing of large social media sites (think of DIGG, Twitter, Facebook, and other high-activity sites being almost instantaneously indexed in Google search).
Whether the algorithm will favor those results over traditional results remains to be seen.
I am somewhat disappointed by this update, to me Google is significantly behind the curve on search at the moment.
I would have hoped to have seen a fundamental change to search, to allow Google to take on vertical search brands.
Google is loosing ground to vertical search engines in almost every major area. A quick look at google trends for terms such as car insurance and cheap flights shows this (google trends is phrasematched so more sophisticated search queries doesn’t adaquately acount for this.
I have believed for sometime that google needs to get radical or risk becoming the default search for the obscure and convenient (brand and local searches).
I would have liked to see changing fields according to the search done.
Google has tremendous power because of its reach, companies will fit in with Google as it will help them get more bookings. Sitemaps, Google should be developing different sitemaps for different verticals, thus allowing booking queries to happen directly from search.
For example if someone starts typing in cheap hotels in london then date fields and a max price field should automatically appear.
The results can still be ordered using Google’s algorithm, but at least that way the user can get a real result first off.
Bing has made a move in this direction with flights, but the process isn’t seamless and in my opinion unless Google and Bing can really move forward quickly in the key verticals of travel, finance, insurance, property, users won’t need to search as they will know 3 or 4 Brands that truly deliver for each vertical and they will have the focus and knowledge to ensure they stay in front.
Richard
GOOGLE INTEGRATING ADWORDS WITH ORGANIC RESULTS!
WOW – check out the URL above and hover over the links below the date boxes, 2 of them are doubleclick URLs, does this mean the integration of organic and paid content?