Google Releases Real Time Results – Not great really

On 7th December Google released a real-time results segment to their results pages. When searching for iPhone in Google you are greeted with this. Half way down the page  you can see ‘Latest results for iPhone‘. This is great, you think, “I can now see up to date news about the iPhone”.

Look at the first results for it:

I’ve had a data plan on my iPhone for a full week now and still haven’t used 100mb. Am I lame?

BradyV – twitter.com – seconds ago

I’m sorry Brady V, as interesting as that is, I don’t want that appearing when I search for ‘iPhone’. Twitter is not a source for reliable, relevant content. It’s user generated with 95% of it being complete shit.

The Google search page now looks cluttered to say the least. Google used to pride itself (release of a fade-in homepage) with simplicity but not anymore it seems. We have sponsored ads which are not necessarily relevant as the link goes to the highest bidder. We then have news results, image results and video results. Again, not really what I was searching but is acceptably relevant but now we this load of shit… Twitter results.

Lets also have Facebook statuses as well, that would be useful when searching for iPhone wouldn’t it…

Why not add to that the TV programmes where a character has said iPhone. GREAT.

Check out the video from their search event, probably not worth watching.

There are a few good things. This is now essentially the large online forum. You can give you opinion to anyone who wants to hear it, (as well as the majority that don’t).

Another issue is how open to abuse is this. If I simply register 10 Twitter accounts and mention where to buy the latest iPhone, through in an affiliate link and I’d be commanding the majority of the first page search results. Are thousands of SEO gurus going to be put out of business by Google giving the power back to the people.

People are jumping on this innovation as an improvement to relevancy of results. This is not the case. The option should be there but certainly not front page.

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