Search Marketing Insights (Emerging Search Trends)
Real Time Search
By: Jamie Keaney, Senior Search Strategist
Search Engines are jumping on the social network craze. They are using Real-time Search as a first step to utilize these networks. Marketers are scrambling to answer compelling questions about this new addition to engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo!. Most importantly, marketers want to know: how will this change the perception of my brand and how can I capitalize on this momentum?
Bing:
Bing started the real-time search results by creating an exclusive partnership with Twitter, allowing them to produce results based on topic popularity.
Bing’s real time results are not integrated into the main search results pages, where you’ll typically see both natural and paid search results. Instead, they’ve stored real-time search results on a page dedicated to Twitter. A benefit to Bing’s results is the keyword cloud that quickly shows users what the top Twitter topics are at that exact moment. Twitter results are streaming on this page and can be paused. Another value-add from Bing is the fact that they order results based on which tweets are being shared most often. Now, Bing is testing the inclusion of real-time search results within their organic search results.
Google:
Google’s real-time search results differ from Bing’s in that the results are directly integrated into the SERP just as image, video, shopping and news results are. Check out how Google is showing results for the query “NFL draft 2010” from blogs and Twitter:
Google allows users to pause the results and halt the constant stream, but only showing relevant updates may be the most challenging piece of real-time search results.
Yahoo!
Yahoo!’s integration isn’t quite in line with Bing and Google, each of which produces a constant stream of results. Yahoo!’s results are real-time in that they are pulled at the time of the query, but are static and do not stream in new mentions of the brand or news event. Yahoo!’s real-time results are also integrated into the top of the SERP in a tab format:
What Does this Mean for Marketers?
How real-time search will affect engine algorithms is not yet known. Search engines could begin using topic popularity as a more heavily weighted factor in their algorithms. For example, if a brand is mentioned closely with a specific product or topic, they may begin getting better placement for related queries.
It is also possible that search engines will index links shared most often and rank those pages better. After all, if a link is shared hundreds of times on Twitter it could be assumed that it’s a good source of unique and valuable information.
The struggle for search engines will be to applying relevancy in real-time search results. Aside from keeping out the questionable language, they’ll have to start pulling in both tweets that include the query, and ones that have information addressing the intent of the query. This may prove to be the most difficult aspect of indexing and ranking content from social networks.
Although the future usage is uncertain, one thing is obvious: reputation management will be on marketer’s radars now more than ever. It’s true that all the content already exists elsewhere, but this information will be available to a mass audience now that it is available on search engines. Marketers must utilize these social networks to learn about customer satisfaction and more importantly to engage in a one-to-one relationship with their customers.
