How Does Real Time Search Affect You?

In December of 2009 Google launched real time search integration that pulls in data from Twitter, blogs, FriendFeed and other sites and places this data on the first page of their search results to provide relevant and real-time search results related to your search query.

In October of 2009 Microsoft announced that they had made deals with both Facebook and Twitter that allows Microsoft’s search engine Bing to integrate status updates into the search results. Bing already allows you to search Twitter directly by visiting www.bing.com/twitter.

So what does real time search mean to you and your brand? Real time search is going to explode in 2010 and is going to mean everything to you and your brand. Think about it for a minute; now every time you update your Twitter feed, your Facebook status or your MySpace page your status update will now be instantly searchable within the search engines. No longer will you be forced to wait for the search engines to index your page before your content becomes searchable in the engines but now by simply updating your status updates on one of the major social networks your status update becomes instantly available to searchers.

Real time search combined with social networks work together to form a powerful tandem of tools that you can use to promote your brand and products. Real time search is set to become a game changing technology in 2010.

Although extremely powerful real time search is primed to be abused and this can also affect how you and your brand may be perceived online. Google is taking a huge chance allowing the real time search results to be displayed on its first page of results. If a topic becomes hot enough (such as the release of the Google Nexus) spammers can take advantage of this by simply Tweeting about the trending topic and including a link to their spam page and now this will be displayed on the first page of the Google results page. The spammer had to do zero work to get on the first page of Google.

What if a group of individuals or spammers decides to attack your product or personal brand using social networks? Search engines and Google in particular will now start showing these negative brand comments on the first page of their results. Without verification to whether the information being presented is true or not, other users searching on that topic will now be shown the negative search results about your product or brand. A simple tweet or status update becomes a powerful weapon that can start a public relations nightmare for you and your brand.

Whether good or bad real time search is something that can not be ignored as it is going to become more and more integrated into the search engines in 2010.