Turns out that real-time Twitter search in Google isn’t such a big thing

Not even a few months the idea if incorporating Twitter results real-time in your searches on both google and Bing were all the rage. People pontificated on how this was going to change the whole search landscape. Even Marissa Mayer one of the head honchos at Google raved on about how this was a changing moment.

“We think the real-time search is incredibly important, and the real-time data that’s coming online can be super-useful in terms of finding out whether – something like, is this conference today any good? Is it warmer in San Francisco than it is in Silicon Valley? You can actually look at tweets and see those types of patterns emerge, so there’s a lot of useful information about real-time interactions that we think ultimately will really affect search.”

Well it turns out that maybe the enthusiasm might have been more than a little overblown if what some recent eye-tracking studies have discovered is true. It appears that people are ignoring those Twitter results that are being included with search results on both Google and Bing.

Personally I have never understood the reasoning behind the so-called importance of real-time Twitter searches. When people are search for stuff it is typically for stuff that they don’t know anything about not about the news of the last minute.