Battle for position
Over the years Google has attempted to rank and rate web content based on many many factors and has for the most part evolved in getting it close to right when you consider broad search. On the local level, it’s never been quite right in that knocking someone off the number one spot for a key search word or term was impossible until blogging came along.
A well titled and well worded article could insert itself within the top 10 results fairly easily so long as your blog was indexed within Google. This was huge for big picture real estate minds that understood that on the micro level on specific targets, their blog was as close to real time as Google could get with information that matters to local consumers.
Google to rank your social relevance via Real Time Search
Insert Twitter, Facebook, and others that were giving consumers an actual real time result of information on the minds of locals and suddenly Google’s inability to be absolutely real time became its ultimate achilles heel. The desire to bypass Google and go directly to recommendations of peers and friends is where the action is, as consumers finally begin to take back the definition of relevancy and how it’s measured, and Google will be having none of that as it insists that it be your one stop shop for anything and everything.
Watch this
Back to reality?
While this has been no secret to most that Google wants its piece of the pie, seeing it in action does come as powerful reinforcement that if you’re not focusing on being relevant even within social media, you simply still won’t be found in Google. This functionality (launching in a few days to all) finally gives tangible evidence of what the future of being a ‘result’ means, and how to become one in Google’s world at least.
The sum
Although many call this a game changer, I’m going to say it’s way too early in the game to say. The variables of adoption begin way back at ‘is social media all hype’ to ‘are we socially overloaded’ like a crowded intersection with people running in so many directions to the unknown.
Sources: WSJ / TechCrunch
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I wonder if most people really want real time results in the normal results? Will be interesting to see how they start integrating RT in the results and if you can turn it of.
Impressive!
Would you say incorporating social media updates into Google search will cause a shift from Google – the judge of relevant content to Google – the aggregator of tweets and FB updates?
I can see about as many benefits to real time search as I see flaws because not every issue is sensitive to timing.
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@erionhouston I think search has entered #40days in the desert with all of this I think with this they run a risk of attempting to be something they aren’t. I also believe they will indirectly incentivize and accelerate the abuse of sm in general. I see chaos in search.
I don’t have a good feeling about this only because I see so many people using social media as spam. Does this mean anyone with a facebook and twitter account can get get first page ranking as long as they post all day. I sure hope not.
@Widgia you can’t turn off real time results but you can pause them, and re-start should you want to do so.