Real Time Search and Major Search Engines

The importance of Real time Search

Real time search has been causing real time spam as well. Let’s see what the big players in the search are doing to make real time search useful.
Body – Danny Sullivan moderates the session and speakers on the panel are Sean Suchter, Ivan Davtchev, and Dylan Casey.

First up is Sean Suchter from Bing Social Search who states some of the obvious challenges namely keeping up with speed, making sense of massive content and relevance of search. Most often the results from twitter are timely but not accurate and often opinionated, reactive and not to the context/relevance.

Most of the incidents get real time response from platforms like twitter over traditional news sources. So to rise above the noise, there is a lot to do as search gets more social.
Such as quality, trust, popularity and timeliness. Some of the new things to consider are:

• people retweeting what you said, sharing good links
• Trust worthy people sharing your links and tweets. The search engines are determining how important you are.
• Number of people retweeting what you said

Real-time relevance needs data mining to filter and rank based on history. Spamming communities can be highly visible and they are keeping a strict watch on this to provide most relevant information

Next up Ivan Davtchev:
What is Real time search? It’s about showing the most relevant up to date content for a topic. Yahoo recently established partnership with twitter.
Some of the challenges stated in Real time search were:

• Real time indexing- has to be done fast
• Query analysis- determining which query real time search has to show up for
• Raking of fresh content: How to find proper anchor text.

How do you know a query is really hot?
They figure it out based on emerging events and news stories (natural disasters, sports political news). He talks about Google trend being a good indicator of how a popular a query is. It works well for head queries but not as much for tail query. So standard approach is not ideal.

Some of the algorithms metric are internal. Yahoo Time Sense for example is an internal tool which plays a key role.

How is this different & better?
They have Language modeling- it means collection of all known words and query log.
Why language modeling? It allows you to ask questions and tells whether the search is prominent and if the data of past search matches to it…then it marks it as relevant to real time search.

Real time practices to avoid:

• Do not create content with multiple bussing terms
• Do not abuse shortening services for spam links
• Do not go over board with twitter #hash tags

Yahoo is removing real time spam. So watch out!

Not the least, up next was Dylan Casey:
What is real-time, why real time is important? All social media tools and channels have made everyone a publisher. As publishing barrier gets less competitive, the need for speed and relevancy goes up. People have begun to use content differently.

Why the explosion of information and why now?

• need for more information, quick information and real time information and relevant information
• Influencing factor of email Vs instant messaging, generating user experience through instant results have become the trend.

Tool to find out what people are talking about- www.Google.com/trends

They introduced real time search in dec 2009. They will be adding new providers such as facebook, myspace and google buzz. In order leverage the technology they use for ranking documents Google has come up with something new.  They look at the number of followers. They look at author quality.

Conclusion: Some of the key take aways here are: Marketers need to be more prudent in what they want to market. Beware of spamming as most search engines are filtering them out. Lastly write often, find something you are passionate about, pay attention to the mechanics of SEO but don’t overdo it.

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Contributed by: Bhuvana Krishnan, Milestone Internet Marketing