Is the future of searching real time?

For the last decade the vast majority of World Wide Web users have found the information and products that they are searching for by using search engines. The big three search engines that have dominated the search space for over a decade now (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft/Live) have developed extremely complex algorithms that provide as accurate search results as they can. Recently however there has been a massive rise in social media networks resulting in new web content being published hundreds of time every second. Often this content provides extremely up to the minute information and opinion on breaking news, unfortunately the major search engines are struggling to index the content and provide it in search results while it is still current. In order to try and combat this a couple of search engines are appearing that aim to prioritise the indexing of social media sites in allowing them to provide results that are far more accurate.

Launched in November 2008 OneRiot is a search engine that aims to provide search results in as close to real time as possible. The search results it provides are ordered by both the number of times and how recently they have been shared on websites such a dig, twitter and facebook. It also utilises a ‘trending topic’ bar, similar to that found on twitter, to display the topics that are currently proving the most popular on the social media networks by analysing how many people are discussing and linking to content on the topic. On the homepage OneRiot also displays a constantly refreshing display of what content is receiving the most attention on the social media networks. In a similar vein Twitter recently announced plans to expand their search function from purely searching posts on twitter to searching the entire web. By following links found in tweets they aim to provide up to the minute results based on topics that are proving the most popular on the network.

So are these new real time search engines going to provide the future of searching online? At the present it seems extremely unlikely that any of the real time search engines will manage to come close disturbing Google’s dominance of the search world, they will however likely thrive as a niche search for specific topics. In particular real time searches could provide an excellent resource for finding up to the minute information on news and current affairs; however in their current incarnation they struggle to find established information that is not at the forefront of current news. In addition to this they seem less likely to provide appropriate results for commercial, or product, searches.

For the SEO industry these new search engines will likely amplify the recent trends. More effort will continue to be placed on social media sites, but current practises and search engine friendly website design will continue to be very important.

Ultimately there is definitely a gap in the search market that real time engines are able to fill. The most likely outcome however is that the big three search engines will roll out their own real time solutions pushing the new arrivals out of the market. Last week Google already began this process when they added the ability to search, and order results, by date, and it is unlikely to be long before they supply a real time search solution.