Digital Media Buzz > Is Real-Time Search Working?

Is Real-Time Search Working?

By John Greaves

Real-time search lets the user seize timely information from a quick-flowing stream of data. According to analysts Matt Booher and Ilona Vijnik, “It’s a step toward giving users the ability to access highly relevant and fresh information, delivered in real time from across the Web.” From the proliferation of real-time search engines like Wowd and Collecta to Google’s recent entrance into real-time search, it seems companies are leaping at the chance to tell us everything immediately.

Booher and Vijnik both of Bridge Worldwide, a Cincinnati-based digital marketing agency say the main question to consider when asking if real-time search is working is to consider how the information provided by real-time search furthers a specific objective.

This includes users who tracked the development of the Kanye West-Taylor Swift story on Collecta and those who shared YouTube videos through OneRiot after learning of Michael Jackson’s death, as well as those who followed weightier issues.

“What’s happening in Yemen right now you can’t find through traditional search,” says Gerry Campbell, CEO of Collecta.

So is real-time search succeeding? According to Tobias Peggs, GM of OneRiot, “Our definition of success for real-time search is ‘Is it adding user value?’ and from a business perspective can that user value be monetized?”

One monetization model involves having clients pay for real-time services. That’s the model used by Jobvite, a real-time search recruitment tool, which boasts it can give job recruiters a real-time picture of prospective candidates based on their total Web presence. Jamie Glenn, chief products officer at Jobvite, says real-time search is crucial to the company’s success. “Recruiters can use our tech to go across social Web to find people who fit a job to see if they’re interested. Once they find that person on open Web or social network they can see that person’s profiles on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.”

Adam Hyder, CTO of Jobvite, says using real-time search enables recruiters to begin to build relationships with candidates. “We had a recruiter who saw a candidate’s wish list on Amazon and he sent a book from the wish list as a gift to that candidate,” Hyder says.

However, not just vertical search engines want to monetize real-time search. According to OneRiot’s Peggs, monetization makes relevancy crucial to making real-time searches more than a novelty item. “If you’re delivering a fire hose of information with no relevance attached to it, it’s kind of hard to figure out what advertising should go with that,” Peggs says.

Analysts Booher and Vijnik say current hot searches include whale wars, Richard Blumenthal and Nexus One for Verizon while hot topics include Microsoft Office 2010 and Nexus One Google phone. This is important data for marketers who use it to tailor ad campaigns to popular searches.

Sites like OneRiot are actively trying to monetize those searches and willingly collaborate with marketers to do so. “If you’re a developer you can grab our API and use our real-time search results from it, we provide tech support, we in addition offer real-time ads, if you’re a developer who’s proved your users like real-time ads we can do a 50/50 revenue share,” Peggs says.

Monetization requires consumer loyalty. Mark Drummond, CEO of Wowd, says providing relevant information brings users back to your site. “People want to be engaged with material events as they occur. A lot of search engines say we’ll vomit at you all the tweets with these words in it. If I want tweets, I’ll go to Twittersearch. ”

Unfiltered searches not only detract from relevance but also attract spammers according to David Evans, CTO of deeplocal.com, which produces the newspaper search engine NewspaperNinja.com. “The problem here is mostly dataset. If we’re seeing a hard time detecting spam in email, we’ll see a really hard problem for Bayesian detection algorithms at about 20 words to sample from. Especially when we’re abbreviating everything and jargon is changing at an alarming rate,” Evans says.

Add to that tweets from disgruntled customers according to Dave Conklin, president of Internet Marketing for ProspectMX. “As human beings we don’t tweet when something is working. The second something goes bad, you tweet about it and you get a skewed point of reference in real time,” Conklin says.

Some sites fight spam by ranking links based upon user feedback. This is the approach used by Jobvite and Wowd. OneRiot’s approach indexes results based upon investigating links to see what’s behind them. Various websites have documented Google’s real-time vulnerability. Google acknowledges the danger from spam but a Google spokesperson says, “Google search aims to show users the most relevant results for a given query. We apply the same high standards to real-time that we do to the rest of the web. There are always unscrupulous people who will try to game our ranking systems, but as always we are uniquely equipped to suppress spam content.”

Spam is also an issue for Internet marketers who post multiple times to keep up with random tweets. They have to be careful to avoid looking like spam. Bob Bentz, who monitors placement for Advanced Telecom’s mobile marketing product www.84444.com, says unstable rankings are behind multiple postings in Google, Bing and Yahoo on many of their company’s most important keywords. “Google rankings are changing sometimes several times per day! Yahoo is not changing daily and Bing rarely changes, although more often than Yahoo does,” Bentz says. “What it says to me is that we need to continue to send new content out there several times per day to keep our rankings active on the first page.” Bentz hopes filtering systems such as Wowd’s panel rank can differentiate between robotic postings and original content.

“I think sometimes we’re concentrating on SEO and we don’t see the forest for the trees. If your stuff is seen in blog posts and articles and someone sees it and wants to come buy your product that’s the goal, not ranking,” Bentz says.

Profitability is what the future of real-time search is about, according to OneRiot’s Peggs, “2009 was about proving that real-time search adds value. 2010 is about monetization.”