Ran Geva, CEO of Omigli has found an interesting hack to make Google come up with real time search results. He should know it well, for Omigli is a specialized search engine that crawls UGC on many ‘real time’ platforms on the web. What Omigli does is besides the point for the time being. The real question how do you make Google deliver real time results.
Most of us know that Google introduced time based search options on web results back in May which was the closest it got to real time tracking of the web. The highlight of the timelines being the ‘most recent’ feature which gave results of content that came up in the past 10 15 minutes (usually averaging at 20 mins), besides features such as past 24 hours, week, month and anytime. This was a feature that they initally had only for Google news. Regular users can access this feature by clicking on Show Options just below the search box in the Search Results page.
Now these features obviously works on some tweaks within the URL to tell the Search Engine what specific period is the user looking for in terms of search. Ran explains that the URL itself is where you can tweak the results to get more real time measures from the web.
What Google isn’t telling you is that you can search in the past minute and even in the past second. The trick is to change a parameter in the URL that will narrow down the time frames. Let take a look at a simple example:
Search for Barack Obama in the past 24 hours:-
http://www.google.com/search?q=barack%20obama&hl=en&output=search&tbs=qdr:d&tbo=1
Notice the URL parameter qdr:d. I assume qdr stands for Query Date Range (sounds about right). All you have to do to search for the query in the past minute is to change the parameter to qdr:n, and for the past second to qdr:s.
That’s it!
I tried the same for Kanye West given that he was more likely to be in the news given his antics at VMA. and I got results as close to 48 seconds.
Googlesystem, a blog on Google related news found results as close as 20 odd seconds working with the same hack. Though these are still away from what Twitter like site’s updates that come through every second, we must realize that these are full fledged news/editorial content that is being updated than just 140 odd characters and hashtags.
Google also has been in the news a couple of years back when it started indexing blogs a lot faster than other sources sometime the minute the blog posts were published. WordPress recently made a countless blogs go real time with their RSS cloud, which means content is going to get pinged real time, at least from blogs. This is important because Google then gets to index a lot of content real time, which it can’t right now – the Kanye search just gave 4 results for instance with the hack. With a lot more content generators (read bloggers) putting up content by the minute (or second for that matter) we are looking at probably a more real time Google as well.
Question then becomes, what becomes of Twitter when Google improves this current hack as a feature.
Especially when Larry Page says this “I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about realtime.”
