Realtime search has been a part of your Google experience for a while. While it added some flair and more information to your results, Google has decided it can do more. To do this, they have given realtime search its own home and added a few new features and tools to make it more useful.
When we first introduced our real-time search features last December, we focused on bringing relevance to the freshest information on the web. Our goal was to provide real-time content from a comprehensive set of sources, integrated right into your usual search results. Today we’re making our most significant enhancements to date, giving real-time information its own home and more powerful tools to help you find what you need.
You can now find Google Realtime Search at http://www.google.com/realtime but, if it hasn’t rolled out to you yet, just use this link to play with it. You can also access realtime results by choosing the Updates option in your Google sidebar.
Realtime Search updates right before your eyes as new results come in. It pulls updates from services like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and Buzz. Depending on what topic you search for, things could get a little hectic, so you can filter things in a couple of ways:
- Geographically – geographic refinements let you find updates and news near you, or in a region you specify.
- Conversation View – instead of a disconnected stream of random updates, conversation view helps you piece the discussion together from beginning to end.
Google Alerts also gets an update today, integrating with Google Realtime Search. If you choose the Updates option when creating your alert, you can have realtime results for your alerts sent directly to your inbox. I think that could get a little ridiculous and is definitely not inbox friendly, but you could also create the alert and subscribe to its RSS feed.
There are a bunch of ways that Google RTS could be improved and I’m sure we will see more updates down the line. RWW shared a few feature enhancements, but these two stood out to me:
- Neighborhood Filtering – you can see results by location, but Google doesn’t really get too specific. For example, instead of simply seeing results around NY or even Brooklyn, maybe I want to see what’s happening around Avenue D and East 39th in Flatbush. The data is there.
- Source Filtering – looking at the realtime search results, you might think Twitter is the only service supplying the data. Twitter always tends to dominate because there are simply so many tweets to deal with. It would be great to be able to see results only from Buzz or everything but Twitter.
While there are a few other realtime search engines out there, I’m pretty sure Google has the search thing in the bag. Definitely a powerful tool if you want to find out what’s going on now about a specific topic. What will you use it for?
via Official Google Blog: Google Realtime Search: a new home with new tools, ReadWriteWeb
