Google has today launched real time search, a mashup of data through its Twitter deal and current search inventory.

According to the official Google spiel “real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it’s happening, even if it’s not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn’t know about it beforehand.” Yes, apparently real time search allows you to search for things you don’t know about yet…yeah, it doesn’t make sense to me either.

In practice, Google real time search takes its visuals from FriendFeed, the soon to be extinct real time sharing site founded by ex-Googlers and now part of Facebook. On a plus side the real time component only takes up part of the screen, so you’ll still see normal results, along with live results when doing a standard search, although notably you can go to a full page of real time results if you want to.

Google real time search will be rolled out globally in the “next few days” according to Google. To access it when it becomes available, Click on “Latest results” or select “Latest” from the search options menu to use.

If you can’t wait that long, add “&esrch=RTSearch” to the end of a search query to access now. The Google real time search demo as follows:

Google Real Time Search Launches, And How To Access It Now is a post from: The Inquisitr

No, “Google Goggles” aren’t something off Urban Dictionary that you can drop into an e-mail when you’ve ended up in bed with a wealthy geek.

Google announced plans today for a new visual search, allowing searchers to submit queries via photograph, drawing on the powerful database of information behind Google Image Search. Vic Gundotra, Google’s VP of engineering, described the initiative:

“It is our goal to be able to identify any image,” he said. “It represents our earliest efforts in the field of computer vision. You can take a picture of an item, use that picture of whatever you take as the query.”

Gundotra fleshed out the merits of the visual search function with a dinner-party anecdote. Gifted with a bottle of wine he was clueless about, he used a visual search to quickly crib knowledge about it and properly express gratitude. During the event in which Google Goggles were announced, Gundotra also used them to correctly identify the Itsukushima Shrine in Japan- one of those things you’d know if you saw but not know the name of unless you’re some kind of trivia dork… clever.

Now, before you privacy humpers get all stressed out, facial recognition is not on the agenda for Google Goggles… yet. Scarily, the function works well to recognize faces, but Google’s wisely chosen not to allow it, which just made a whole bunch of girls on the C train breathe a bit more easily.

At the event, Google also demoed an English to Spanish translation using a cell phone.

Google shoots for visual search with “Google Goggles” is a post from: The Inquisitr

The real time web is showing up just about everywhere these days. Regardless of whether there is any merit of Google, and Bing, incorporating Twitter into their search results it appears that Google could be making a major shift in how it indexes the freshest content available.

According to an excellent post by Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb, and a post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog, Google is targeting RSS and Atom feeds in order to identify fresh content on web pages. Granted this isn’t the real time search that proponents commonly talk about but it is definitely a much faster method that previously used.

It was also hinted at in the Google blog post that t hey are seriously looking at how to use new protocols like PubSubHubbub (try saying that 10 times fast) in order to speed things up even faster. The protocol enables near instant notification of any changes that have been made to a web page which means Google search would be able to index the new information pretty well the moment it is published to the web.

Sarah does point out one major problem that Google is going to have to overcome as they move more in the direction of real time search results – the ranking of those results.

That, of course, would lead to a whole new series of challenges for the search engine – most notably, how to rank the real-time results? Given that Google’s search algorithm has been built on top of the concept of PageRank, a way to determine the relevance of a website by what other sites link to it, ranking search results that are so fresh that there is an absence of links could prove a difficult feat.

Sarah does point out that this is something that Google is working on but it will be interesting to see what kind of effect changes to the PageRank algorithm will have on web sites when it comes to their PageRank value.

The other thing that this shift could have a big impact on is how new content is delivered in RSS feeds. Right now a large number of the popular blogs and online versions of newspapers deliver only a partial text feed. This means that unless they seriously consider switching to a full text feed they could lose out drastically in search results.

I will say that it is this aspect of the real time web and search that I find much more interesting to watch instead of the pseudo-search results of things like Twitter.

Google search to get speed boost – a good reason to use full text feeds is a post from: The Inquisitr

I’ve spent the past few hours searching around the tech blogs, SEO blogs, forums and Twitter but haven’t been able to find anyone who has made the connection between the recent Twitter Lists feature and the Twitter search deals between Bing and Google. Surprising, really, so I’ll take a stab at it.

On September 30, 2009, Nick Kallen wrote an official Twitter blog that they had just rolled out a new lists feature to selected users. Rather than rewrite a summary of that blog here, I’ll quote the main points below, followed by my thoughts. Nick wrote:

“The idea is to allow people to curate lists of Twitter accounts. For example, you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends, or any compilation that makes sense.”

Essentially, Twitter users will be able to categorize the people they follow. How does this have anything to do with the later announcements of search deals between Microsoft’s Bing search engine and the Google search deal?

Categorizing accounts adds a new layer of meta data to the enormous amount of random bits of information spewing out of Twitter at any given point in time. That meta data makes it much easier for the search engine software to quickly crunch the data for search queries. For instance, someone goes to Google or Bing and searches for “Lakers game tonight.” Rather than having to crunch all the data coming out of Twitter in the past 24 hours, then find and output relevant tweets, the software first looks for tweets by members who are on lists categorized as Sports, Basketball, Lakers, etc. and give those tweets priority.

Nick then goes on to say:

“This means lists have the potential to be an important new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.”

See the paragraph I wrote above…

“We started working on this feature because of the frequent requests we received from people who were looking for a better way to organize information on Twitter. Of course, that means not just twitter.com – the Platform team will follow up in a few days with information on the Lists API. This will allow developers to add support for Lists into your favorite Twitter apps.”

And the new lists API will no doubt be used by Bing and Google as well.

There have been rumors swirling around for nearly a year now about real-time search. Pundits and tech bloggers have been wondering which of the big search engines would be the first to do “real” real-time search and do it right. The biggest problem that’s been standing in the way of real-time search, in my honest opinion, is the sheer amount of random data being produced by social media and the real-time web. Or rather, no plausable way to make that data easily discoverable on the receiving end where the search engines are.

Other big user generated content sites have turned to allowing their users to categorize and tag things in the past. Look at how Flickr encourages it’s users to tag, categorize and comment on photos and video. From the beginning, Myspace and WordPress.com have benefited tremendously by making it natural for users to categorize, comment on and tag stuff. And long before Facebook started tearing down it’s walls, much of it’s tremendous growth has been due to making it easy for users to grow content and networks by making their data easily discoverable. Of late, Google itself has been encouraging searchers to interact with it’s content by voting up and down, removing items from their search pages and add tags or descriptions to photos.

All of what I mentioned above adds meta data that can be used to deliver more relevant results to searchers, faster.

Twitter is a business with a massive amount of user generated data being produced 24 hours around the clock. Those speculating about Twitter’s business model can finally put the subject to rest. They’ve made their product more usable and at least 2 huge companies have jumped committed to using that product.

Meta data. Twitter lists are just the beginning.

Twitter Lists and Real Time Search deals – The Big Picture is a post from: The Inquisitr