Real Time Search

With the popularity of social media site such as Twitter, real time search is becoming much more of a reality. As many of us are aware, Twitter is the 30th most popular site in the world (according to Alexa), and thus, everyone will have already experienced RTS (Real Time Search).

But what exactly is RTM?

Basically, when something new appears, the search engine can index and display the new content within the same second. A good example of this is the Twitter search: http://search.twitter.com/

The Problem for the major search engines to implement RTM?

All search engines would like to have their SERPs uptodate by the second, however, this is not possible yet due to the vastness of the web. If an SE would like to offer real time search, it would mean that their spiders and bots would have to be indexing and caching every webpage on the internet continuously, every second in every day, 24/7.

Twitter can do all this as the content and “tweets” are stored on Twitter’s own database.

The solution?

The search engines have come up with their own solutions to this.

Google have been offering the “recent results” search option for some time now:

Not perfect, but a very good start. One programmer here saw his new blog post in under 8 minutes using this option.

That’s Google, for now. What about Bing? Well, this is my favourite so far.

Bing has now started to show Twitter results in their SERPs for famous people. I’m sure they will expand on this in the near future. I’m not sure if Google would show tweets in their SERPs due to their position on the web – they won’t like to rely on a third party. What’s you opinion on this?

And finally, we have Yahoo! Sorry, who? Ah, yes, Yahoo!… Yahoo don’t seem to be doing anything at the moment…

Ahmed Bhula
Natural SEO Programmer