Comments on: Real-Time Search Changes Online Content

By: Looking at Marshall Sponder’s deck “The future of social media monitoring” « Fredzimny's Blog

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 10:03:33 +0000

[...] George F. Snell III: Real-Time Search Changes Online Content (hightalk.net) [...]

By: gfsnell3

gfsnell3 — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:09:01 +0000

Hi Rod:
How can anyone not trust a blog called “Bookgasm?”

By: Rod Lott

Rod Lott — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:02:33 +0000

George, thanks for the kind words! It feels good to be trusted!

By: gfsnell3

gfsnell3 — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:44:53 +0000

That’s an excellent question, but I don’t think that’s the purpose of real-time search. The purpose is to present instant info – what is happening right now. Reliability isn’t a major concern.

The real question might be what are people using the search engine results for? If you could filter by the users’ “purpose” you might be able to add a lot of value.

For example, if I’m searching the web to research a business paper – I want hard-facts from reliable sources. Everything else is not helpful. So could Google filter out entertainment, parodies and sites that filled with outrageous, questionable propaganda?

And if I’m searching for entertainment purposes could Google weight the results toward the funny, amusing, outrageous, etc…

This would, of course, open up another can of worms – requiring Google to rate how information is presented on each web site. That presents a lot of BIGGER problems, but interesting to consider.

By: Daniel Honigman

Daniel Honigman — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:26:59 +0000

Thanks for the shout-out, George. I think a lot of it depends on the interface. Google users are used to a very simple, authority-based system. (Well, maybe the algorithm isn't simple.) I wonder if they're working out a way to rank real-time search results by authority, or audience, the same way Google results are ranked by PageRank.