Are Google's Real Time Results Relevant?
After using Google's real time search for the last couple of weeks, I am left feeling unimpressed at this stage. It seems that what you get with this feature is a mini Twitter page right at the top of your search results. Google and Twitter are two completely different things, so why are they used together in this way? Google will no doubt say that now we can now get search results as they happen, but does this mean we receive better, relevant results?
I can understand why Google has implemented the real time feeds. It's seen the remarkable growth in popularity of sites such as Twitter and Facebook and wants to be a part of the social media revolution, but I feel this is a rather clumsy way of amalgamating with these websites.
Apart from the potential to spam the real time results, as shown on many blogs of late, a lot of the results are quite trivial and of little interest to people searching for meaningful information. A 140 character comment can work well within the Twitter environment, but can be less welcome when you're trying to Google something to get listed high in the search results, content should be of a certain quality and truly relevant. Isn't that what Google's always telling us? While some filtering is used, we are still presented with mostly trash, in the prime position, right at the top of page one.
As an example I recently did a search for the popular Avatar film.
Well, so much for the first Twitter result I received, not what I wanted to know, that's for sure. The second result is of no real relevance either, and the third is hardly informative, although I agree with
In its desire to provide results only seconds old, it appears Google has given us less relevant results. Surely this can't be right, aren't we supposed to be getting the most relevant results to our search terms? I don't wish to be too negative about this, and hopefully things will improve, but meanwhile I can't see how I would want to turn this real-time option on, as the quality of results returned are low and hardly relevant.
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