14 Sep, 2009
Google “Real-Time Search”? Not Quite
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A newly found ‘hack’ is doing it’s rounds on blogs, forums and social networking websites today. The trick involves altering the URL slightly on a Google search to retrieve so-called “real-time” results. You can tailor the results to be to a specific time frame, but is it really real-time?
Everybody knows about Twitter and how the search retrieves the latest updates from users relating to a specific key phrase, and there has long-been speculation that Google is looking to advance on this functionality. The Google Caffeine update which was announced a couple of months ago is still in testing, but it appears to be ranking social media a little higher than before, which does suggest a more real-time approach to information.
This new hack, however, is not real-time. Although it is a nice little way of finding recently cached pages, it is not returning the instant results that people still crave. For a site to appear in the Google listings it has to be cached first – and this certainly isn’t instant (in most cases).
Changing the URL to tailor search results is a nice little trick, but it is not something that greatly interests me to be honest.
Your thoughts?
