Google Realtime Search: a new home with new tools | Hacker News Reader

Google Realtime Search: a new home with new tools

googleblog.blogspot.com

32 pointspavs13 comments

We launched http://48ers.com a few weeks ago to do a similar thing. Obviously Google doesn't have our scale, raw computing power or potent technical acumen, but it's nice to see them trying.

If it goes anywhere for them we'll most likely just buy them out and quietly sunset their little pet project.

Just tried your site with an open mind (hadn't heard of it before now). Alas, Google Realtime returned much better results. After the top few links, in fact, your results seemed to be unrelated to the query: http://48ers.com/search/?q=sanebox vs http://www.google.com/search?tbs=mbl%3A1&hl=en&sourc...

Any idea what went wrong?

I've just checked the search and the results seemed to be pretty accurate for me:

http://www.mediafire.com/imageview.php?quickkey=fgb8wcu4ouls...

Was it on a later page they seemed to go more fuzzy ?

How odd. Your results are different (and better) now. When I looked before the first three links were great, after that it was as if they were for a different search.

I notice that you don't update the search results, any specific reason for not doing so (given that you call it a real time search)?

Just that we wanted to get a minimum viable product out of the door and this feature didn't make the cut.

It's on the todo list to add in, but we thought it was just a "nice to have" that seemed to be the current fashion for realtime search. Turns out people deem it to be more important than that, so it's now one of our higher priorities.

Google Alerts is really old. I went through my emails today and came across some alerts I received way back in 2007 or so.

I think it is a fairly good service, but, I think I stopped using it because it all got to be a bit too much information. I just did not need it.

I suppose real time search is an awesome tool for a researcher though, especially the ability to go back in time and see how the conversation developed, if, that is, such conversations span years.

> So if you’re traveling to Los Angeles this summer, you can check out tweets from Angelenos...

> Often a single tweet sparks a larger conversation of re-tweets...

> Now you can create an alert specifically for “updates” to get an email the moment your topic appears on Twitter...

Ok, so basically Google is setting itself to be an interface to Twitter?

Smells like a soon-to-be acquisition scnerio to me.

Why? Twitter had similar deals with Bing to let them use their real time search results http://www.bing.com/social/

And Facebook. And Buzz. And probably all other status feeds they can get their hands on.

(But sure, from playing a bit with the feature, it sure looks like Twitter is drowning out everyone else.)

FastCompany already deemed it a major Dead End (inane article, but was speaking about "streaming search" which seems the same thing). :D http://www.fastcompany.com/1684939/why-google-streaming-sear...

Handy! http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&esrch=RealtimeLaunch%...

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