Real time search live on Google

Real time search is here. Today Google announced search results you can now see in real time…

What does ‘real time’ mean?
As the world is tweeting, updating a Facebook status, submitting a wiki, news article, blogging etc on the web, you can have it right there and relevant to your search as it happens. This is hugely significant for the way users use Google and how the marketeers will sell on it…

What does this mean for search engine marketing?
Up to now it’s been difficult for online marketeers to justify spending too much time on social media to promote a business. Facebook and Twitter have found it hard to monitise their sites as users really aren’t looking to make a purchase. They’re socialising.

Now real time search is fully integrated into the main Google search engine results pages (SERPs), people searching for products will get real time social network search results well as the business listings, adwords ads and organic results.

Any links you include in your Twitter updates for example, are fully click-able in the SERPs which is great for anyone with something to say (or sell).

As it stands most of the updates you get are Twitter based (and blog and news articles) but Facebook and Myspace are on board and will be live soon.

What does this mean for search engine optimisation?
What I think this means for SEO is that all our hard efforts to make web pages relevant and SEO friendly have taken another blow as they could in all possibility be below the fold even if it ranks well.

I did a search for ‘climate change’ and the first organic and non timely or social networked result is the BBC, way down the page after three adwords ads, the latest news results and the real time search results. Obviously it depends on what your search is but it’s worth thinking about how this evolution in search affects the industry nonetheless…