The tech community has been throwing the phrase “real-time search” around like a hot potato for at least the past year. However, most real-time search offerings simply haven’t lived up to the promise. They’ve been released to great fanfare, but have yet to be widely adopted by regular internet users.
That may change soon- Google, the 800-lb gorilla of the search engine world, just released its own real-time search offering, called (appropriately enough) “Google Realtime.” Realtime lets you search tweets, offering better results and more filtering options than Twitter’s own search feature does. For example, you can choose to limit results to a certain geographic area, and you can “rewind” the results to see what people were saying about your search topic in the past. This post from HubSpot also seems to indicate that results from other social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace will be included at some point, though right now all the results I’ve seen have been from Twitter.
Assuming it succeeds where other real-time search engines have not, what does Google’s Realtime search mean for marketers? Obviously, it provides another way to enhance the already considerable power of word-of-mouth on social networking sites. The ability to set alerts also provides an easy, free tool to tell you what people are saying about your company or brand on Twitter. As HubSpot puts it:
Businesses participating in social media will have a clear advantage in getting found online because of their automatic inclusion in real-time search results. Marketers now have a new tool to monitor online conversations about their business and understand which marketing events directly caused an increase in word-of-mouth buzz during a given time. Google real-time search is a huge boost for marketers not only in monitoring but also in demonstrating the value of social media to their business.
With real-time search, customers’ voices are only going to get louder. Give them something to talk about, and make sure it’s something positive.
