Real Time Search and Google: An Admission

Recall my piece on "from static to real time search," and read this coverage of Eric and Larry's take on Twitter: Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, separately admitted Google needs to learn from Twitter and make its search engine operate at real-time speed. Speaking at the Zeitgeist event during in a…

Recall my piece on “from static to real time search,” and read this coverage of Eric and Larry’s take on Twitter:

Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, separately admitted Google needs to learn from Twitter and make its search engine operate at real-time speed.

Speaking at the Zeitgeist event during in a “fireside chat”, hosted by Mr Schmidt, Mr Page admitted Google had so far “done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per second basis”.

“People really want to do stuff in real-time and they [Twitter] have done a great job about it… We will do a good job of things now we have these examples,” said Mr Page.

9 thoughts on “Real Time Search and Google: An Admission”

  1. I blogged about this earlier this week prior to Google admitting their ability to beat Twitter at their own game by making some subtle changes to what they index from Twitter: Why Twitter Is No Threat To Google

    That’s the beauty of Google and why people need to stop heralding Twitter and others as imminent Google killers. Their ability to reach into Twitter’s streams and index them on Google puts a damper on Twitter being able to tout their real-time search advantage over Google.

  2. Quote from Dave Winer:
    “Then a few hours later Larry Page hinted at the explosive breakout I’m looking for. If I can write on the web, on my own server, and still have it instantly accessible to people who follow me, whether they use twitter or splitter or donder or vixen, then I’ve got:

    1. My choice of tools.

    2. My choice of servers.

    3. When Twitter goes down I stay up.

    4. They can be neutral or not and no one cares.

    5. I’m no longer locked in.

    Just one little protocol to implement it. I ping them when I update. They read the document I say changed. If it did, re-index. If it didn’t, ignore the ping. That’s all. Everything about Twitter reduced to a new search engine from Google, something they’re good at, and a small enhancement to my CMS (and to be clear, it’s old tech, we’ve been doing this in the blogging world since 1999).”

    Source:
    http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/19/takingOffTheTrainingWheels.html

  3. I believe Mr. Winer via Mr. Anonymous may really be on to the big ultimate problem for twitter…

    It’s not that status updates or the value of the accumulated real-time data are going to go away…

    It’s just that ultimately there are too many other ways to both create and spread an individual’s voluntary, brief broadcasts for twitter to lock it up…

    And while there are natural concentrations that take place for certain Internet functions because it benefits users to be where everyone else is for one reason or another…

    I don’t think this is one of them since it can so easily be duplicated with some variation (you know… like some wonderful new fritter!! with 200 character updates!) and then some other third party aggregates both the twitter & fritter and everyone else’s feeds for search…

    The Internet is going to require some new economic forms to sustain these things.

    Aardvark is an interesting example if it ends up working out. We’ll see… it’s a perfect example of where the work is widely distributed to a voluntary network who may actually enjoy it… but the monetization (again, if it works out) could well concentrate.

    In addition, to the degree that it’s successful it could potentially reduce some current economic activity that would otherwise have taken place.

    This doesn’t mean Aardvark shouldn’t happen! In fact, I think its a great idea (though many traps in implementation) but just that the Internet has unique economic qualities which will need to be addressed eventually.

    Miscellaneous on Status Updates, Distributed Intelligence and New Economies

  4. It is impossible to search in real time, even less if you want slightly relevant results, what architecture/technology/crawler would be able to perform this?
    One thing is doing it with the amount of information twitter has and the other with what the hole web has that is in the magnitude of trillions.
    And what would be the benefit of real time here?

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