Google has added a new set of features to its search engine that allows user to access information as it is being generated in real time. The features are an acknowledgment of the pace at which information is being generated today, and will be rolled out in two days worldwide.
“There was a time when search engines would crawl the web once a month...,” said Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, announcing the new features via a video conference from Google’s office at Mountain View, California. “[Later] the crawling was done every few minutes. But the web has grown at an even faster rate.”
The ‘real time search’ feature is meant to addresses this reality. Google’s search results page will no longer remain static. Instead, the page will have a box called ‘Latest results’ which will keep getting updated as and when new information about the queried subject is published online.
When we tried the new service by searching for ‘Copenhagen summit’, the box kept getting updates from websites of news agencies, blogs and even Twitter updates. There is a ‘Pause’ button as well, which will stop the stream of information.
Google also announced tie-ups with social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca (the company had announced a partnership with Twitter recently). With these partnerships, Google will offer a new search option called ‘Updates’. This will allow you to search within the public status updates of users of these websites.
This may be a useful feature when you want to keep track of developing events — sites like Twitter have been used by ordinary people to report developments during the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the more recent protests in Iran. While you can start searching within updates from Twitter immediately, searching within Facebook and MySpace updates will take some time, Singhal said.
The new features are available on the iPhone and any phone running on the Android platform. The company said it plans to extend the service to phones running on other platforms such as Windows Mobile and Symbian.
As Singhal notes on his blog, “search is still an unsolved problem”. With these new features Google has taken a few important steps towards the solution.
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