With the massive upsurge in the use of real-time applications such as Twitter, FriendFeed and the recent homepage updates that were introduced to Facebook; being able to effectively search this information is one of the modern web's greatest challenges. 
In May of this year Google added the ability to search content by time frame e.g. content that was posted in the last week, last day, last hour (click on the 'search options' link under the Google logo on the Google results page). The problem is that the sheer volume of information being submitted to real time applications is just too vast for even Google to keep up. If you look at the top trending topics on Twitter and then do a search for them on Google, applying the 'last hour' metric, they almost never show up. 


This is a big problem that needs to be resolved. 'Real-time' is one of the key innovations of the modern web. The immediate availability of the information and knowledge being broadcast through these applications is transforming the way we operate.  Below the noise and irrelevance being spurted by many, there are news stories being broken, business is being done, lives are being saved.


However, unless we find a way to search, filter and drill down to the information that we are after - the power of this Real-time revolution will not be fully realised. Real-time search is a fascinating, technical and challenging problem. I'd love to say I have the answer but for now it eludes me! 
 


Comments




Leave a Reply