Google Real-Time Search: a Review

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You may have heard of Google's latest effort to provide the freshest, most relevant results to searchers. It's called Google Real-Time Search. How has it changed what will turn up where on the search engine results pages? And is it really an improvement?

On December 7, 2009, Google announced the release of "Real-time search" in the search engine results. Matt Cutts covered it in his blog. This is a new feature that will enable Google to provide the latest updates (in terms of both "freshness" and "relevance") on any search query/topic a user researches.

According to Amit Singhal of Google's Search Quality team (responsible for Google search algorithms), "Light can travel around the world in 1/10th of a second, and we won't rest until the speed of light is the only barrier to getting good search results to you."

So I am very eager to give Google Real-Time Search a try by testing it out. This article basically covers my own personal observations of what I have experienced using real time search, which should provide some idea to other users of how to learn more about this new Google search result feature. This review also offers useful input to Google in further improving real time search.

How to use

Matt Cutts states in his blog that Google processed billion of documents per day for their real time search. Well, that is a lot, and Google has really improved significantly in speeding up the crawling and indexing process, which is exceptional despite the already-enormous and increasing size of the web.

So let's start with a basic question: how does a user get real-time search results?

Step 1: Go to www.google.com

Step 2: Type your query and press "search."

Step 3: When the results load completely, find "Show options" under the search box. Click it.

Step 4: Under "Any time,", click "Latest." This will let Google give the latest results (real-time search results).

It is very impressive that Google is still able to provide updates as early as "1 minute ago." This is very fast, and is really "real-time." You can even see that Google frequently adds updates even when the browser is not refreshed as indicated: "New results will appear below as they become available."

To stop receiving frequent updates, you can click "pause."

Next: Assessing Relevance >>
 

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