Today, at its Search Event in Mountain View, Google Fellow Amit Singhal took the stage to announce a big new feature for the search giant: Realtime. âItâs Googleâs relevance technology meeting the realtime web,â is how Singhal described it.
As weâve learned over the past several months with Twitter Search, relevancy is perhaps the key to making realtime web search a pillar of the web. Google seems to believe it has cracked the code for this, and has been internally testing it for a while now. But starting today itâs going live for everyone.
Singhal showed off the new feature by doing a query for âObama.â The results page shows results coming in in realtime. And yes, it works with Twitter. For example, Googleâs Matt Cutts tweeted something from the audience, and in popped in the results immediately. This is the first time any search engine has integrated realtime results into a standard page, Google says. Obviously, this is huge.
Google will offer realtime trends (it will be interesting to see how these compare to Twitter trends), and Trends is officially leaving Google Labs today. This new realtime search will work on both Android devices and iPhones immediately. Google says there are over a billion realtime documents a day that it will be looking at. This includes tweets, blog posts, and also information from sources like MySpace and yes, Facebook.
âThe importance of relevance has gone through the roof as the amount of information out there is growing. Relevance has become the critical factor,â Singhal noted. He went on to note that a lot goes on behind the scenes to make sure the relevancy remains intact.
When this goes live, you will see a new âLatestâ option in the âShow optionsâ sidebar of Google Search. There is also a way to filter results just to status updates from Twitter and the like.
âLight can travel around the world in 1/10th of a second, and we wonât rest until the speed of light is the only barrier to getting good search results to you,â Singhal noted. Quite a goal.
