Google's real-time Search: Future of Search or Useless Information Overload? Part 2

In my previous blog posting I pointed out a few problems I see with real-time search. This is a continuation of that post.

Irrelevant Information
The articles associated with the other two headlines I mentioned above have nothing to do with the news surrounding Tiger Woods and appear to be taking advantage of his current popularity in the media and on Twitterto drive readers to their articles. If the scandal surrounding Tiger Woods was not currently happening, these articles would likely not have been released at this time. This provides a problem for people who are trying to find relevant information about Tiger Woods.

Anyone can go on Twitter and see what the trending topics are and then create an article using the keywords of that topic without it having any real relevance to the discussion. These types of articles end up cluttering the stream with information that is irrelevant to the primary reason someone is searching for a particular topic. I see this as a problem in that a hot topic on Twitter will be driving the content that is being created for the web.


The Tiger Woods Blog Experiment
As an experiment, we even created a blog about “The Top 3 reasons Tiger Woods should not design your website” and sent out a tweet. Interestingly enough, we did not see it come up in the real-time stream, which led to questions about how Google determines what is real-time worthy and what is not, or how it determines who is relevant enough to actually quote as a real time source. We speculated that it may be looking for other keywords that are associated with the Tiger Woods scandal, but at the same time, several Twitter jokes about Tiger showed up in the stream that did not seem to contain any other keywords.

It did not take long for us to get a “WTF?” comment on our blog for the same reasons I've discussed about how people take advantage of a current hot topic and don't offer any relevant content.

One Bright Spot
I must be honest and say that I personally have not been following the Tiger Woods scandal and was able to learn through the real-time search that as a result of all of this mess he is losing some of his endorsements, which in my opinion is somewhat newsworthy. Look for my post on the positive applications that real-time search provides within the next few days.

By Google providing information in real-time, it becomes the searchers' responsibility to filter out all the useless information—and misinformation—that comes through the real-time feed in order to find what they are truly looking for. We have always had to do this with information on the Internet, but not to this degree.

Through Google's regular search algorithm, high-ranking sites are determined based on quality content. With information being provided at such a rapid pace, it seems it would be almost impossible to be able to determine the quality and relevancy of all the content that comes through its real-time search results, as my examples also suggested. I know real-time search is still in its infancy, but until some improvements are made, it is very likely that news junkies and gossip hounds may be the only ones who regularly use it. The rest of us will quickly find better ways to spend our time online.