Google Does Real Time Again

October 28, 2011

Google+ Rolls Out Real-Time Search and Hashtag Support

On October 12, Google Plus rolled out two new features; both allow users to create custom news streams based around topics being shared and build upon the search functionality of the network. The first feature, a real-time search, finds results from Google+ posts that are related to the search term a user enters. As new posts are created centering around the search topic, the user is notified and a real-time stream of posts is begun. ZDNet’s article, “Google+ Real-Time Search: The Social News “Ticker” tells us more about the changes:

… Google engineer Vic Gundotra – who posted the news from his Google Plus feed – notes that it’s a great way to keep up with real-time news events, such as a speech, a court trial or a sporting event. Basically, it’s a real-time news ticker for niche topics. The second feature – hashtag support – essentially turns any hashtag in a post into a searchable term that can be used as another way to create feeds and real-time streams.

This is a catchy notion. I’m interested to see if Google+ will begin integrating all social networking posts into their search results. What they’re doing right now isn’t groundbreaking; Twitter already offers the exact same feature. However, it would be groundbreaking to be able to follow trending topics on all the major social networking sites as they correlate to breaking news.

But Google did real time before. What’s “real time”? Whatever Google wants it to be I suppose from a marketing viewpoint.

Stephen E Arnold, October 28, 2011

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