Making the real-time Web relevant, Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (Apr 5)
"Instant content" - that's a good phrase - so is "signal to noise ratio" - both belong to real-time search - the term usually used for looking at the fire-hose of postings from social media - another new term to represent all those places where people announce, jot down, opine and chatter.
And, it seems, it's all part of a trend to an explosion of content on the web - one that does show sentiment and maybe signficance - and one where there may be new agreements (or monopolies) for accessing that content.
Lots in this article.
"Search has been our gateway to the Web for almost as long as it has existed, and the big search players of the day are gearing up to handle a new challenge: how can the explosion of instant content produced by news organizations, blogs, and social-media users be organized in a relevant fashion, sorting through one of the worst signal-to-noise ratios in modern communication?"
Danny Sullivan sees real-time as mainly Twitter. Microsoft's Paul Yiu says there are " two components to real-time information: the actual content of the status update or post, and the link that is being shared within that update".
Major search engines watch for similar topics in spikes in search queries and Twitter feeds.
At Google --
"At that point, Google starts evaluating the relevance of its real-time content sources in order to determine what to surface in that box. Three things count: quality, or the spam-or-real question; the authority of the author of the content, determined by a PageRank-like algorithm that gets beyond mere follower counts to evaluate the quality of one's followers; and semantic evaluation, using Google's language data to filter status updates that may share characters but are unrelated ("gm cars" as distinct from "gm foods")."
Of interest:
""Yahoo's search deal with Microsoft does not include real-time indexing and ranking efforts