Lots of news out the past few days – everything from Windows 7 to Google’s deal with iLike and LaLa to Bing’s Twitter and Facebook search deal and then Google’s Twitter search deal.
I haven’t seen this much buzz inside of two days in the search space in months; we can probably blame the Web 2.0 Summit for that.
In any case, lets get down to business – the Twitter search deal is huge.
Let me say that again…HUGE.
We’ve been hearing about real-time search for years now; the basic concept of finding information in real time. Essentially, you submit a query and you are served results as they happen. Now, Google has done a bit of this in the past with the “…in the past 24 hours” style results; but what happened yesterday is a really bold step towards true real time data diffusion.
In the worlds of SEO and social media; the synergies between the two have existed since social media platforms went open source. Twitter pages, Facebook pages, Ping.fm links, Flickr and god knows how many more sites are indexed and ranked – but the content on them is really outdated by the time they hit the SERPs.
Search and Social Hold Different Functions (at least, for now)
I, like many others, use Twitter to discover content I wouldn’t normally find via a search engine and I use search to find information that I wouldn’t normally associate with social media. But, of course there’s a very gray line to that.
…and folks, the line just got even grayer.
At The End Of The Day…
The aftermath of this is going to be fantastic; the only two real players in search (once the Yahoo! deal closes) will both be offering real-time search feeds from Twitter and Facebook. Google has long indexed Twitter’s public content but its been incorporated into their regular search results. Now this content is getting special treatment – much like how shopping results, news, pictures and videos are blended into universal search.
And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Think about what the future holds; real time search of social media as a whole.
Real-time discovery of newly taken photos, newly created music and art
One really exited marketer, signing off…
zerflin
3 Comments
This is cool because it's going to make it SO much easier to stay connected to my friends who actually post cool stuff.
The is wacky because it leads to things like Kanye West's death being faked.
Hello there! I'm also excited for the integration of social into search results, it'll definitely help bring SEO back to a more pure state where sites are ranking well as a result of great on-site experience and brand outreach, rather than all the sites out there trying to game search engines by buying paid links and leaving pretty worthless blog and forum comments just to get their link out there.
One thing, you note, "In the worlds of SEO and social media; the synergies between the two have existed since social media platforms went open source." – "Open source" refers to the free accessibility of a website's code and a user's ability to take the code and tweak it how they'd like, and then "own" that code. Most social media platforms are actually pretty resistant to this – just look at how Facebook forces users to maintain the look and feel of the Facebook platform, same with Twitter. Sure, developers can use the code, but Facebook still owns it. Even more custom social sites like Ning keep you pretty within their lines. Just wanted to clarify!
Thanks!
Alicia M.
Well said. We are certainly on the same page – and regardless of who owns the data (site owners, artists, social networks) it's incorporation in search results a plus for everyone.
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