On Monday, Google announced innovations to real-time, mobile and social searches that point to the evolution of information access. The new features will be rolling out in the next few days.
For starters, Google is adding a stream of real-time content from across the web. When users conduct a search, they will be greeted with live updates from people on Twitter and FriendFeed, along with headlines from news and blog posts published in the last few seconds. Google will even rank relevant results to show the freshest information.
“Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it’s happening, even if it’s not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn’t know about it beforehand,” said Google Fellow Amit Singhal.
Real-Time Search in Action
Singhal pointed to a story about GM’s stabilizing car sales as an example. When a user searched for GM, stories about the car sales would show under “News results.” But with the addition of real-time search, the “Latest results” category would reveal another story that broke just seconds earlier about GM’s CEO stepping down.
Searchers can also click on “Latest results” or select “Latest” from the search-options menu to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other web content scrolling on Google. Searchers can even filter results to see only updates from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others. The new search options are also optimized for iPhone and Android mobile devices.
As part of the launch of real time on Google search, the company added “hot topics” to Google Trends to display the most common topics people are publishing to the web in real time. With this improvement and a series of other interface enhancements, Singhal said, Google Trends is graduating from the labs.
“Our real-time search features are based on more than a…