Google Realtime, Useful Web Marketing Solution or Cool Gimmick
Did you even know Google Realtime Search existed? Probably not, and if you did you may have known it as Google Real-time Search with a hyphen. Anyway, in the know or not, Google Realtime Search now has its own home page at http://www.google.com/realtime
This realtime feature allows you to conduct a search once and then continually monitor the page without needing to refresh. You don’t get the standard results displayed by Google.com, realtime does what it says on the tin and provides up to the minute results as they happen. This provides the searcher with a comprehensive insight of relevance for a given subject matter, gathering results from news feeds, Twitter, Friend Feed, Facebook, blogs etc.
The feature is heavily dominated by Twitter; see my search on the keyword “blogging below”. In fact a few of my recent search attempts have seen the first page completely consumed by Twitter posts– which indicates that Twitter may be a more useful web marketing solution than I have previously given it credit for, but then how many people are actually using Google Realtime and how many people actually take notice of Tweets by random individuals with seemingly little subject matter authority.
On one hand Google Realtime signals the need to keep churning out daily relevant content from your website/blog, and on the other hand it appears like a Christmas toy that really gets you exited for about ten minutes until you spot another internet gimmick and put it down.
The things is this, in terms of a web marketing solution the standard Google.com search is adequate, and if your site/content is properly optimised you can usually guarantee good rankings within 24 hours for a new content posting. Furthermore, the only reason I can think of using Google Realtime for on a regular basis is tracking breaking news , but then breaking news is pretty fast to break on Google.com without having to sift through all the Twitter post rubbish. What do you think?
