Monday, December 7, 2009

FedEx welcomes Google Real Time Search. Tiger Woods .. Not so much.

This is 2009. A year that very simply is redefining the Internet, both for regular and casual users.  A year where the word 'journalist' is changing at hyperspeed, and a year, where a 'ping' can now be heard around the world, in nanoseconds.

Google has made no secret of their need to embrace the latest trend in search. Numerous Google executives had noted the rise in popularity and importance of real-time search over the past few months.

Real-time search was already being delivered to the Internet by Twitter, Friendfeed, and most recently Friendfeed's new parent company, yes Facebook.


As I write this, Google Real-Time Search is already LIVE here in the US.  A visit to Google Trends, and then to the new Hot Topics column and you might see something like this screen shot taken a short time ago:


Clicking on any of the hot topics displays a 'classic' Google search page with a brand new embedded and scrolling real-time display with current, up to the minute results from a variety of sources including Twitter, Friendfeed, Identi.ca, Jaiku, and Facebook ..... while integrating associated news headlines within those results.

Needless to say, there are huge implications for all of the included services as well ...


I would guess that there are a few people at Google watching right now to see if their own news today from the GooglePlex tops 'Hot Topics', and then, of course, to watch the results stream in ....

..... in real-time.



Other views:
Google's Matt Cutts live blogged the presentation on his personal blog this morning here.  The Official Google Blog announcement can be found here.  Kara Swisher's report for WSJ's AllThingsDigital is here and Danny Sullivan wraps things up for Search Engine Land here.

Update: An interesting take on Googling Facebook from ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick has been posted here.