Comments on: Google Real Time Search Too Personal?

By: hawk

hawk — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:41:32 +0000

Google already exposes a lot of stuff about people, and without any recourse to remove stuff from their results – for some people it is down right embarrassing.

By: Steve Media

Steve Media — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:56:34 +0000

Google already exposes a lot of stuff about people, and without any recourse to remove stuff from their results – for some people it is down right embarrassing. With google showing more and more about the world, and the individual people in it, and growing their services but taking over chunks of the world and aggregating others, I wonder what the future holds for our privacy with google. The could compile info not only from twitter, but linked in, and the social networks, combine that with the mapping technology and plop down a streetview of your house, office, and the entertainment venues you have been sighted at. It’s down right scary how much worse it can get in the future.

By: Kai

Kai — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 03:31:40 +0000

I think the real time search should be further down in the search results.

It would be funny to see a real time search, “Hey I just picked my nose” when people search for your name.

By: Hotel Booking

Hotel Booking — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 08:00:49 +0000

Google has always been innovative about making the search more user friendly and I thinks it will be good for regular readers to jump directly to the most recent post.

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:30:39 +0000

I don’t know the current criteria for including a Twitter account.

If there was a Twitter account called used cars, there is a chance it would appear for sure, not just a news event

By: Ben The Bar Man

Ben The Bar Man — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 03:36:28 +0000

What I don’t get is this:

If I Google the words “used cars” does this mean I’m going to get Twitter results about “used cars” because if it does I’m using Bing… I have a facebook and have to read enough crap as it is without seeing peoples post about used cars…

If I’m trying to buy a car, the last thing I care about is what someone on the other side of the world thinks about used cars…

I get it if I Googled “Angelina Jolie” but thats unlikely…

By: Luke Jones

Luke Jones — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 21:01:53 +0000

As I’ve said many times on SEOMoz and Twitter, I’m very sceptical about real-time search. There is too much that can go wrong with it. If you searched something like “Pope incident”, you could get something completely random, irrelevant and perhaps even offensive.

That isn’t the only reason why I dislike it, but there are far too many things for me to go into this weekend – shattered!

By: Shyam Kapur

Shyam Kapur — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:54:39 +0000

I enjoyed this post and the comments. There is no question that Google rushed its implementation of this feature. A more thoughtful approach could have been attempted by investing some more time in building relevant technologies like, for example, TipTop has built. I also do not think anyone has a right to question what shows up when they do a search for their name. It is the community of users that will together determine what is useful and what is not, not any one individual’s preference.

By: Anthony Taylor

Anthony Taylor — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:44:34 +0000

I have been experimenting with the real time search for the last few days, and it works well for casual, conversational searches or those that demand information on very recent events.

For example a search like ‘Rage Against The Machine’ bring up real time tweets on Google.co.uk commenting on them getting to the xmas number one.

This was really useful on Sunday when I wanted to find out who had won the chart race as no other results on Google were supplying the information, presumably because it had not been written or crawled by Google yet.

On the other hand, when it comes to more serious information searches on non-real time issues, the twitter results appear low quality and too casual to be of any use to me.

Anthony

By: Patrick

Patrick — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 05:09:08 +0000

I’ve come across the same thing and at the moment it does seem too much weight is being giving to real time (for certain keywords certainly), bearing in mind that newest doesn’t always equate to most relevant.

But Google’s real time is still utterly in its infancy, as time goes by I’m sure their metrics will be ironed out and weightings will become more focused, but for now I see Google’s real time effectively being at Beta stage, and in that respect they’re still playing catch up to Twitter.