Google has moved to head off some of the threat from young rivals such as Twitter and Facebook by announcing plans to prominently display results from social networking sites in its search pages.
The new development, which the Californian technology giant dubs “real-time search”, aims to bring users more up-to-date information as they scour the web for information. Over the next few days, anybody searching online using Google will see their traditional search results augmented by a string of constantly updating messages drawn from social networks, news sites and blogs.
The move is part of a wider push to make Google’s search index even faster and more up to date, as people increasingly use services like Twitter to transmit information about events as they happen. Bobbie Johnson, The Guardian.
Personally I can’t think of anything worse than Twitter – I haven’t the attention span of a Goldfish and like a little detail not the puerile twitterings that occupy 140 character tweets – and don’t get me started on Facebook.
Christ this seems like the human race as a herd rampaging around our collected knowledge like so many china shop bulls – or maybe I’m missing the point
“There’s no doubt that it’s good to have,” said Danny Sullivan, a prominent observer of Google’s activities, writing on his SearchEngineLand website. “It’s incredibly difficult to be a leading information source and yet when there’s an earthquake, people are instead turning to Twitter for confirmation faster than traditional news sources on Google can provide.” Bobbie Johnson, The Guardian.
Personally I turn to the BBC – and what I don’t understand is, in the aftermath of an earthquake who’s going to be twittering from the afflicted area – surely it takes reporters with all the backup that news corporations supply to provide reports – I can’t see what trawling the 20 odd million messages posted each day – Christ next they’ll be trawling my text messages – that’ll make exciting reading – “will you get some milk”, “where are you” and “I’ll be late” – much like twitter.
Is there a serious search engine out there?