Many of us have all heard the phrase “real time search” over the last 6-12 months and I think we are going to hear it a bit more as time moves on. Are websites like Twitter and Facebook going to take down the all mighty Google? Probably not, but they could really give the search giant a run for their money…eventually.
Real time search is still something that is nowhere near maturity but you can bet every cent in your pocket that every major search engine, all the social giants and a handful of start ups are trying to devise the technology that can accurately bring real time social search into the spot light. At best the whole concept is still crawling but it is only a matter of time before it is running wild. The ability to scrub millions of people’s current online conversations is just around the corner. The power of this type of search is really unfathomable. To find someone in California who is conversing with a friend about a new surfboard they want to buy and have a vendor almost tap them on the shoulder to provide them a link to a product page will have marketing departments across the world smacking their chops. We have already started seeing search engines like Bing pull in Twitter profiles and topics into their search results and it is probably just a matter of time before one of these search giants starts pulling in real time conversations into their search results. On a side note, Bing has just started incorporating some Twitter data but nowhere near to a real time social search that I am talking about. Imagine having the ability to also pull a Facebook or Twitter conversation into your Google or Yahoo! search result? Now that would be impressive!
The first search engine that accurately starts to pull in real time social search feeds and data will single handedly change the way people communicate online. At that point we will have entered the second phase of the search engines life cycle. Almost like a Web 3.0+ type of a thing. How many phases of improvement the search engines have in their life cycle nobody really knows but we have already started seeing signs of phase two. As our online communication tools keep evolving more and more people will be able to really perform all daily communication functions right from behind their computer. These types of digital communication lines leave things wide open for marketers to be able to reach out to an individual person. As more and more people grow and are willing to let the whole world see their conversation more companies will try to figure out just how they can jump in between that conversation without being shunned by the public. Real time search is on the forefront of technology and will soon become a reality. Everything has a life cycle. Search engines where not the most popular when they first came out but evolved into some of the largest companies in the world.
