Google has launched today its real-time search, which means that Google search results will now include fresh, relevant content from news, blogs and social media.
From the Google blog: “Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.”
The way I see it, this is good news for blogs, because the obvious preference that Google has traditionally shown to well-established, trusted content such as the content from Wikipedia has always made it difficult for new blog posts on the same subjects to rank well, even if they were very relevant.
As a Google user, I was often more than a little dismayed with the fact that even if results were almost always relevant, they were not always current.
This also seems to me like a “if you can’t beat them, join them” kind of thing – with more and more searchers using Twitter instead of Google to find real-time, current information, Google simply had to start including current information in their search results.
Finally, I find it an interesting development in terms of the Google algorithm – because traditionally Google has given a lot of weight to inbound links, and with current results, they would obviously need to place more importance on on-page relevancy rather than on inbound links, since fresh content doesn’t have time to collect those links.
I'm Vered, a blogger for hire and social media consultant. I create and implement social media campaigns for my clients, with the goals of increasing brand awareness and loyalty, improving search engine rankings and driving targeted traffic to my clients' websites.
