Showing posts with label real time search. Show all posts
Showing posts with label real time search. Show all posts
09:07
Who Broke the News (or the Embargo) First?
Let’s say a company is about to launch a new product and, as is the standard practice, they have pre-briefed a select group of media outlets and bloggers about the news under an embargo.The launch date is close and writers have already prepared their news stories so that they can push them as soon as embargo is lifted. And then something strange happens – one media outlet publishes the story ahead of time thus breaking the embargo – intentionally or unintentionally.
Find Who Broke the News Embargo?
Broken embargoes can be frustrating for journalists and bloggers as the limelight (and page views) often shifts to the news publication who did not honor the embargo.If a news embargo gets broken, here’s a simple way that may help you determine the name of the publication that broke it in the first place.
Step 1. Go to google.com/realtime and type a few words from the story headline.
Step 2. In the timeline, click an area where you have minimal number of tweets around that story. That’s when the news first broke on the Internet and looking at the tweets, you should be able to figure who broke that news.
To give you an example, Google pre-briefed a number of publication about the priority inbox feature of Gmail and the news was supposed to stay under embargo until 9 AM. eWeek however published the story at 8:36 AM while others still had their story in the queue.
This technique works because most sites now auto-syndicate their content to social sites like Twitter and Facebook. Since all the stories are getting on Twitter, you can easily sort them by publication time through the timeline of Google Real Time search.
10:46
Bing Adds Tweets to Search Results
Microsoft’s Bing has started to show tweets in search results in an effort to improve its ability to respond to queries about breaking news.
Writing on the Bing search blog, Microsoft says that, “Bing now pulls in social content generated on Twitter to surface the most relevant updates within seconds of a breaking news event.” Those updates show up near the top of search results, with an option to click “more social results” to see additional tweets.
Microsoft signed deals with both Twitter and Facebook to integrate status updates into Bing last year. Google did similar deals, and has already integrated Twitter, Facebook and MySpace into its real-time search results. Bing says they’re currently testing their features with a small subset of users, but plans to launch them to everyone (in the US anyways) shortly.
Are you using real-time search? Let me know about your experience in the comments.
10:12
Google Index to Go Real Time
Google is developing a system that will enable web publishers of any size to automatically submit new content to Google for indexing within seconds of that content being published. Search industry analyst Danny Sullivan told us today that this could be "the next chapter" for Google.
Last Fall we were told by Google's Brett Slatkin, lead developer on the PubSubHubbub (PuSH) real time syndication protocol, that he hoped Google would some day use PuSH for indexing the web instead of the crawling of links that has been the way search engines have indexed the web for years. Google senior product manager Dylan Casey said yesterday at Sullivan's Search Marketing Expo in Santa Clara, California that the company plans to soon publish a standard way for site owners to participate in a program much like that.
How The System Might Work
PuSH is a syndication system based on the ATOM format where a publisher tells the world about a Hub that it will notify every time new content is published. Subscribers then tell the Hub "when this Publisher posts new content, please deliver it to me right away." So instead of the Subscriber checking back with the Publisher all the time to see if there's new content, they just sit and wait to be told that there is by the Hub. The Publisher publishes something, then tells the Hub that it's available, then the Hub goes and delivers it to all the Subscribers. This can take as little as a few seconds.
If Google can implement an Indexing by PuSH program, it would ask every website to implement the technology and declare which Hub they push to at the top of each document, just like they declare where the RSS feeds they publish can be found. Then Google would subscribe to those PuSH feeds to discover new content when it's published.
PuSH wouldn't likely replace crawling, in fact a crawl would be needed to discover PuSH feeds to subscribe to, but the real-time format would be used to augment Google's existing index.
As Danny Sullivan told us today, Google would have to implement some sort of spam control and not just let content be pushed live to the index unvetted. That was what happened in the earliest days of search and it was a real mess, he told us.
The Advantages of a Real Time Google Index
PuSH is much more computationally efficient for Google but Slatkin says that even more important is the impact of such a move for small publishers. Right now many small sites get visited by Google maybe once a week. With a PuSH system in place, they would be able to get their content to Google automatically right away.
A richer, faster, more efficient internet would be good for everyone, but the benefits in search wouldn't be limited to Google, either. The PubSubHubbub is an open protocol and the feeds would be as visible to Yahoo and Bing as they would be to Google.
"I am being told by my engineering bosses to openly promote this open aproach even to our competitors," Slatkin says. That's a very good sign.
We expect this will be a very big deal and we'll be covering it more extensively in the coming days, as well as whenever Google has something to announce more formally.