Why "Real Time" Search misses the point of what makes social media powerful

As Google and Bing scrabble to lead the move towards Real Time Search, are they missing the point?

I admit I've always had issues with search engines and the SEO/SEM industry that rides its coat-tails. First off, if I am looking for something specific I rarely want 48,000,000 pages to sift through to find it. I'd rather have a handful and for them be highly relevant. If I asked a friend for some opinion or advice and they reeled off for several hours about a whole load of stuff that barely brushes on what I am talking about, Rain Man like, I'd probably never bother asking them again. And yet it seems totally acceptable for search engines to do the same.

An example. Search Google for "PR companies Huddersfield". It comes back with 146,000 responses. Now, there are only 11 PR companies in Huddersfield and the town only has a population of 146,000. Unless every single resident has PR expertise, or those 11 companies have managed to generate over 13,000 of content each, there is a whole heap or barely relevant tripe that Google is feeding back to me. Only 4 of the 11 companies actually get a mention on the first page of results and, as we know, not many people go beyond that first page when looking for answers. So at best Google has come back with worse than 40% accuracy on my request.

Good enough? Well, potentially not as good as asking people you know for a recommendation of a PR company in Huddersfield, which is what social media enables you to do. More and more people, especially those with Twitter desktop (and mobile) client TweetDeck open all day, are simply turning to Twitter to ask their followers for specific recommendations. They may not get a response -- and it may not be immediate -- but when they do they'll get something very, very relevant, usually with the value of a word of mouth recommendation attached to it. Google knows this is happening and is panicking enough to rush Real Time search results into the mix -- you can now filter Google results by those posted in the past hour, for example.

But whether it's real time or not -- and I don't believe "Past hour" IS real time -- it misses the point of why people are gravitating towards asking for business recommendations of contacts on Twitter and other social networks rather than turning to Google for responses which aren't in the slightest bit considered. In fact, the only level of qualification, if you can call it that, is that the ones you get first in your results have mastered search engine marketing and search engine optimisation, rather than than the PR, printing, telesales or skills you're actually looking for. The best at providing the specific service you need don't get listed first, as might actually be useful.

All this reminds me of a debate I got into with the managing director of an online business directory some time ago in a forum. We discussed his site, a pure directory of businesses, against mine at WeCanDo.BIZ where we have a directory (it's just a part of our site) but listed first are those with the highest number of endorsements from customers. He smugly pointed out to all reading the forum that he'd searched his site for an accountant and got 24,000 results; he'd searched our site and (at the time) got 6 results. I pointed out that no one wants 24,000 accountants, they typically want just one and for them to be good -- and being able to pick the most suitable from a short list was more useful than throwing a dart at a wall papered with Yellow Pages listing. He didn't argue against it.

So what could Google or Bing offer as a more credible alternative to pages or irrelevant twaddle, placed only through the "skill" of a search engine guru? Well, Twitter-like networks of their own that could be polled for a response might be a solution. But many have tried to emulate Twitter from scratch and failed. Perhaps being able to simultaneously tweet your search request to your own network of followers would help, so that as well as the 146,000 results from Google's servers you could have a proper real time update of responses from your Twitter followers on the same page? Twitter offers OAuth to enable us to be logged into Twitter while on other sites which can then use Twitter's features, so not hard to do if Google or Bing felt so inclined.

Or you could wait to see what Facebook does now it has web search on its site and Friendfeed waiting to be integrated into the site proper. It would be quite possible with the tech they've got to offer alongside traditional web search an ability to simultaneously broadcast your request to your Facebook users, as well as potentially any other network (including Twitter) you have connected to your FriendFeed. Could the social media sites themselves point to a new future for search?

Either way, "search" is changing with the power of crowd-sourcing attached and I, for one, cannot wait!

Your thoughts are always welcomed; just post a reply below.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz