Charticle: The Battle for Real-Time Search
I'm still uncertain why "real-time" search has become such a buzzword and so important to benchmarking the abilities of a search engine. The function of a search engine is to search. Hopefully, this search has access to a large amount of data that is extremely varied. On this point, all but Google fail. What can be gleaned from Facebook and Friendfeed sources is limited and self-limited. I'll have to let it suffice to say that Twitter contains so much noise I feel it's fairly useless as a resource. Turning back to Google, for a moment, their largest problem has not been the amount of data they collect, but the frustratingly limited way it's been possible to search it. If my search is too specific, I end up with nothing. If it's general enough, I end with some unreasonable number of hits. Google, though popular, for quite sometime has been an abysmal search engine. I am very glad to see that changing recently.
As far as the necessity for "real-time" searches, I believe that by monitoring a particular topic or discussion of a brand might be helpful in a larger perspective, but responding to such information "real-time" can be, at best, reactionary. On the other hand, I suppose I can understand the value of more immediate changes in search rankings, brand buzz, and such for the SEO gurus. That, however, is a very different topic.
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