real-time search

Dodge's Challenger is a modern muscle car. The Challenger explosion 25 years ago was a tragic moment. Other than the name they don't have much in common, but for several hours Friday morning, Google's AdWords system considered them linked.

That's just one example of a weak spot in Google's famous AdWords system, which turned an interesting Stanford science project into the world's most powerful Internet company. Simply put, it takes some time for the AdWords system to determine whether an ad triggered by a search query is truly relevant to that query, meaning that … Read more

Twitter has scored some of the most prime advertising real estate on the Internet: Google's search pages.

In what Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan called a first, Google has agreed to show Twitter's promoted tweets on its real-time search results page. The companies will share revenue from clicks on those ads, Sullivan confirmed with Google, although the nature of the split wasn't disclosed.

Twitter allows businesses to purchase ads in the form of tweets that show up at the top of search results for a given topic. Those ads will also now appear in Google search … Read more

Updated 11:23 a.m. PDT throughout with additional information and background.

Google has changed the way it presents real-time search updates, giving those search results their own section and a "conversation" view designed to cluster like-minded updates.

Back in December, Google first introduced into its search results the concept of "real-time" search results from sources like Twitter and news organizations, placing a dedicated window among regular search results that automatically scrolled through links to stories or tweets related to that topic. It still plans to highlight these types of results among regular search results, but … Read more

And then there were three Twitter search customers.

Yahoo has agreed to purchase access to the Twitter firehose, adding real-time Twitter content to both search results and Yahoo profiles. The company has been featuring Twitter content in search results for some time but plans to augment those results now that it will receive content directly from Twitter rather than having to pull it from the service through public APIs, said Jim Stoneham, vice president of communities at Yahoo.

Google and Microsoft announced similar plans months ago at the Web 2.0 conference. Yahoo will continue to integrate Twitter content into … Read more

If you've ever done a real-time search on Twitter or Google News, you might have noticed that it takes some work to get to the details of a developing story or topic at large. Beyond headlines and short summaries, there can be chunks of information that don't surface without a full read. Factery Labs, which in November launched an API for pulling out such facts from all over the Web, has a new product that's trying to change that.

The new tool, which the company is calling a "real-time fact engine" gives users several tabs … Read more

Not to be outdone by its rivals, Yahoo is getting into the real-time search business as well.

Days after Google announced its plan for integrating content from sources such as Twitter and blogs, Yahoo on Thursday plans to launch its own feature to integrate tweets into search results. Microsoft already displays Twitter results for queries placed on its Bing search engine, although they displayed on a separate page that is not directly integrated into the main search results.

Yahoo will join Google witih integrated results as of Thursday, said Larry Cornett, vice president of product management and design at the … Read more

Before too long, expect to find anything that anyone puts on the Internet on Google within seconds: with luck, it might even be useful.

Real-time search has come to Google. The company has been hinting at this day for several months, most recently when it announced a deal to access Twitter's "firehose" of data. But it presented its vision for real-time search before the media Monday at the Computer History Museum, claiming to have made a little history on its own.

Over the next few days, Google users will start to notice a box called "Latest … Read more

Google announced Monday the fruits of its earlier deal with Twitter, showing off how it has decided to present real-time Internet content within search results.

Amit Singhal, Google fellow, introduced the real-time section during an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. "We are here today to announce Google real-time search," Singhal said, calling it "Google relevance technology meets the real-time Web."

Twitter search will show the latest matches for a particular search term, but Google wants to do more than sort results by time. "Relevance is the foundation of this product,&… Read more

New start-up Factery Labs is launching its first service on Tuesday, a technology called FactRank that can tear through Web pages and collect what it calls "facts." These are bits of information from each source page that Factery Labs' algorithm then organizes into an order of importance.

What this means for you is that developers will soon make use of the technology in third-party search engines or on Web pages to very quickly deliver reading summaries. This cuts out most (or all) of the parts you don't care about, while organizing the bits you might. It also … Read more