Facebook have announced the launch of a new search facility which will allow users to search the last 30days of Real Time status updates for users who have public profiles.

“You now will be able to search the last 30 days of your News Feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan. If people have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends. Search results will continue to include people’s profiles as well as relevant Facebook Pages, groups and applications.” Taken from the Facebook blog.

Facebooks existing search is terrible and the news of a new real time search facility will be a great addition to the service and open Facebook to new opportunities. Our biggest concern is the content of the status updates. Unlike Twitter, Facebook is a very personal service; users tend to be a lot more open and personal with their individual status comments. With Twitter you are aware that you are Tweeting to your selected audience, it feels a lot more public, but with Facebook a user could be under the misconception that they were only Tweeting to their immediate friends, especially if the user has not correctly updated their privacy setting. This could result in personal status updates being publicly viewed. Obviously this is an existing issue with the service as it stands now, but a new search could massively increase this problem, bringing unwanted exposure to unknowing Facebook users.

Real Time search is a great addition to Facebook and we are really keen to test the service as soon as it’s available.

Article by Creative SEO UK

The Real-Time Search is the Holy Grail of the search industry, the battle to be the first search engine to successfully integrate Real-Time results, in a usable format, into a search engine continues. Scour are the latest company to launch their version of integration but is it a success?



Scour have taken a very nice and simple approach to adding Real Time search. Instead of building a new interface or allowing users to search specifically for Twitter users, Scour have directly integrated results into their existing listings. Whenever a Real-Time result is displayed, Scour place an orange rosette logo next to the listing to identify its source. This simple approach does help to quickly find a Twitter post by a keyword search. One thing we have noticed is that the data does seem to be a little out of date and it would be interesting to know how frequently the data is being refreshed.

On the whole it’s a great first attempt and one of the simplest methods of integration we have seen so far. We really like it, it would be great to hear your opinion.

Article by Creative SEO UK

This is a great video of part of the Crunch Up event which took place recently. The video starts with an introduction to some new, Real Time search applications including Seemic, Brizzly, Lazy Feed, People browser and Wowd. What’s particularly interesting is the different directions each company has taken into bringing together real time search into one location. Twitter, Friendfeed, facebook, blogs and more all in one location with many features which allow categorised and filtered views of data and even a direct message IM style thread based conversation function. It really give a feel for what the future holds for the technology. As always we are waiting to see exactly what Google has put together with the launch of Google Wave later in the year.

The Video continues, there is a bookmark applied by Matt Cutts, with the Real Time Search Panel which includes Gerry Campbell of Collecta, Matt Cutts of Google, Kimbal Musk of OneRiot, Vipul Ved Prakash of Topsy, Edo Segal an Investor and founder Relegance, Sean Stutcher of Microsoft, Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch and Danny Sullivan. This is a fascinating insight into the future and is well worth watching.



Article by Creative SEO UK

Let us know your thoughts and opinions below by adding a comment.

Twitter has been identified as the next fighting ground for search engine supremacy, but has Bing jumped the gun and what does Google have up its sleeves?

Bing, Microsoft’s latest search engine, was launched last month to challenge Google and Yahoo in the search engine ratings war. It has to be said that Microsoft have done an excellent job, Bing offers its users a great service and it seems that although shrouded in a little controversy, Microsoft have improved their share of the marketplace.

Hot on the heels of their launch success, Microsoft is continuing to apply pressure to their competitors by being the first search engine to index “Real Time” Twitter Posts. Twitter posts offer an amazing source of real time opinion based information which will enrich and improve the relevance of a search engine’s results. But have Bing jumped the gun?
Bing is not indexing every Twitter post, only a selection of prominent celebrity Tweeters. Have Bing rushed the technology to market, offering only a partial solution?

Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft’s search technology centre, wrote on his blog: “Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres.

“We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search.”

Prominent Tweeter like Ryan Seacrest, Al Gore and Guy Kawisaki are all indexed in the Bing search engine. Twitter results can be seen by using the keywords “Tweet”, “Twitter” or the @ symbol as part of a search query for the name of a twitter user. The results will include the user’s latest tweets (we have seen between 1 to 3 tweets being indexed so far per user) and a link to “see more tweets”. Currently this service is only working in the US version of Bing.
This all seems very impressive but Bing are not offering their users anything new, all of this information is available in Twitter itself and using Bing to search a partial database of twitter users will not offer users an accurate level of results. Search terms from within the Tweets are indexed within Bing, but a prolific Tweeter might Tweet 20+ times a day, which means that only a 1-3 of the users Tweets will appear indexed in Bing and only for short periods of time. We have not seen any evidence to contradict this.

Bing’s attempt to integrate Twitter content into its indexed search results seems to be more of a test than a usable new “Real Time” search facility. Let’s hope this was not a marketing and publicity exercise or just an attempt to beat Google. Bing needs to continue to develop this product, increase the number of indexed tweets and index the entire Twitter database in order to make this a viable addition to the search engine. It’s an exciting technology and it does seem a shame not to launch a fully working product.

Google have been reportedly in talks directly with Twitter and have shown a massive amount of interest in integrating Twitter directly into its search results. Not a lot of information has been released about Google’s current position which leads us to believe that something could be on the cards. We will just have to wait and see but let’s hope Google learn from Bing’s initial mistakes.

Article By Creative SEO UK