Breaking Ranks

Why Google Real Time Search Fails

Carl Franzen Dec 15, 2009
Google's introduction of a real-time, up-to-the-second stream of tweets, blog posts and news articles on its search results pages last Monday was heralded by bloggers as a game-changer. Barely a week later, the backlash has begun: Tech bloggers have griping that the new feature is  more vulnerable to hackers and thus more prone to spam. But perhaps the most biting assessment yet comes by way of a Google-fan blogger named Alex Chitu, who says that the biggest problem with Google real-time search is that it favors the frivolous:
Google forgot to focus on relevancy and started to show irrelevant results from Twitter. Just because someone posts uninteresting messages about a popular topic doesn't mean that the tweets are suddenly relevant...

From what I've seen so far, Google's real-time search shows the limitations of Google's relevance technology. Until these limitations are addressed, Google should stop cluttering the search results with irrelevant Twitter messages.

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