Love them or hate them Google have been the number one search engine for years, they have become a brand in themselves and a huge household name.

With the current real time phenomenom, which is completley overated in my opinion in terms of search, Google have been getting into a panic because they think that if they do not stay on top of things they are going to lose out on valuable market share. So how have the search giants responded to this?

• Social Search
• Real Time Search
• Google Wave
• Tons of other products and services

We know that Google do a lot of lab testing, but to see things such as real time search be fed into the main index, sometimes even above the organic listings is absolutley mad! These real time results are in no way relevant to what I am looking for and it just looks like a whole lot of spam.

What really is real time? Why are Google in such a panic? If you are looking for a product or a service, real time results are not what you want to see, what you want to see is trusted sites that give you what you are looking for.

So you ask yourself why has real time communication grown so much? Well, it hasnt… What has happened is that more people are now online than ever before and these people just want to talk to each other, most users on sites such as Facebook and Twitter just want to talk to people and view their pictures etc.

Real time communication has been around since the dawn of the internet, does anyone not remember the old MSN Chat?

Now this was genuine real time communication, where you could talk about all of the lastest and greatest happenings on TV/news etc. MSN Chat was hugely popular/successful and well ahead of its time in my opinion. The best thing was that it was moderated by the community, the community got to decide who entered their rooms and room creators were awarded with gold hammers to moderate the room. (This was infact how I first got into SEO, optimising the chat rooms to appear on the first page of the category).

MSN Chat was a real time community like no other.. So why then did it end up shutting down? One of two reasons really:

• Rooms were getting spammed constantly by advertisers
• Because it was extremeley busy, a big reason for MSN chat shutting down was that it provided another opportunity for pedophiles to have access to underage prey through the chat rooms.

So now if we take a look a Twitter as example, have any of these problems been addressed? No!

Twitter are bombarded with spam after spam and because it relies on users there will ALWAYS be spam. I mean even http://twitter.com/twitblacklist shut down, simply because it was getting so bad and this was in July 2008.  This is why Facebook can avoid this merely because its you talking to people you know.

Real time communication has still got the same interest it always has had, the only reason more and more people are using these services is because there is now a heck of a lot more people online.

But do we need real time spam (which will always be there) among us when we search? No we do not, all people want Google to deliver is trusted sites, in the end this is what people are looking for when they perform a search on Google. By all means use sites such as Twitter to see posts or pages which are being talked about, but including nonsense, spammy and irrelevant personal conversations in the main index is not a good idea. Past experience and internet history has always shown that when you give users full power things start to slide.. Just look at the redundant MSN Chat and MySpace more recently.

Google go back to your roots and display highly relevant results of pages online, use busy social sites as a ranking factor but do not include conversations in the results.

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There is so much hoo ha about Twitter killing Google and Twitter being the future search tool. Every single article that you read about Twitter is that they do things in real time, real time discussions and buzz, which is something that Google’s results do not really do and do not really cater for at the moment.

Google has responded with so many different methods, the most recent being feeding in Twitter results into the SERPs and having the option to bring in results that were updated in the last hour. But in my personal opinion twitter is a social site like any other site. There are some downsides to the service in my opinion, which are as follows.

Information
Information and news is all very well and good being in real time, but what if someone wants to find old archived information or read older stories, can they do that? No they simply cannot, because it’s all in real time and sites are actually never crawled and indexed, it is going to be very hard.

Products
Now this in my opinion is the main killer for Twitter and it’s something that Google are doing wrong too. Google are now trying to bring in more real time results and results which are current that people have just posted or talked about. Every non tech person (the mass user) I know uses either EBay, Google or Amazon to buy something, with Google probably being the first choice. They do this because one, it’s easy just type into the search and away you go. Two it’s relevant, Google have never let me down when I want to buy something, they deliver the most trusted sites to me. Now what could these product searches do instead? Search on Twitter and get conversations? No thanks, or create an account and ask your 0 followers to help you out? Or I know, grow your network communicate with people you do not know and ask them, but why? Why would anyone do that? People have busy lives and they do not have enough time to constantly update their tweets. What easier solution then to go to Google and type in what you are looking for, does it have to be real time. No, not at all, trusted products from trusted sites which have built that trust with hard work and clever advertising.

Now do not get me wrong twitter has a place in the market for news and stories, but Google is so much more than that, maybe they are beating Google on the news front and if Google want to jump on that bandwagon and fill their SERPs with real time STORIES then fine, maybe it would be a better way for them to earn revenue. I mean what a clever idea to fill the SERPs with ever changing info and letting the businesses (products), battle it out on the PPC side of things. But I can tell you they are going to lose a lot of users if they do as Google is not just an information engine. Twitter is a social site just like any other that we need to use in conjunction not against. MSN Messenger does exactly the same job for me but better, I talk to people I know in real time and can ask them anything I want. I do not think Twitter can ever overtake Google, but can be a useful tool to use if you have the time, which a lot of non tech people do not. I mean was MySpace not a Google killer? Was Digg Not? Wolfram Alpha, Cuil? Stumble? Twitter is a great real time news and information addition to Google; all this makes Google a better search engine.

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I don’t usually post news stories as I try to make the blog different and unique, I mean why post something that everyone else is posting, with exactly the same stance. But I feel that the Caffeine update that Google have recently announced is well worth a blog post.

Here is a caption from the official announcement

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Read the full post by Google Here

The Google caffeine update clarifies exactly what I have been saying and thinking for the last few weeks, you can refer to the recent blog post http://www.seotops.com/google-are-now-bringing-in-more-real-time-results_1096/
I like to post about things that I see and notice happening in the search industry from experience and testing. So let’s get down to discussing the Caffeine update. So what does this mean to search positions? The future of search? And so many more unanswered questions?

Well from what I have seen although Google say that they are testing the new infrastructure on www2.sandbox.google.com and some people stating it will not affect the results. I have been seeing this is the current SERPs for some weeks now. Basically what I am seeing is results constantly changing, updated content is getting a fresh boost for major terms a lot more now query deserves freshness, part of the faster indexing and crawling capabilities. I.E. new blog posts go straight into the Top 10 for competitive terms and gradually drop out. Results are no longer stable and personally from a searchers point of view it’s a good thing. The reason I say this is because the internet has expanded so much, whereas we used to have a strict Top 10 with all the best sites, there are now so many more sites online and simply not enough room to show ever decent authority site in the Top 10.

We all know that users do not navigate to page 2-3-4 etc, so what Google can now do is constantly refresh the Top 10 with the authority and power sites, so users get to see much more great sites as well as newly created content for what they are searching for. This is basically a response to Twitter and a right back at you to Bing.

But from what I am seeing, although Google seem to be bringing in real time results and constantly refreshing the SERPs, the Top 4 positions seem to be still be stable. Again the reason for Google doing this is because they have to please all searchers, although moving into real time is all very well and good, a lot of people still want consistency and a huge amount of users click on the Top 4 results, so they have to stick. I mean if you go and search for something find a great site at the top, you want that site to appear there next time.
So where does this leave SEO? Personally I think it’s good for the SEO sector. I mean even the most competitive terms do not get that much traffic from positions 8-9 and 10. So the constant refresh will allow Google to deliver a constant flow of great results and allow all sites to get coverage numerous times a day, stable positions for competitive terms will be a thing of the past, unless of course you are a good SEO or employ a good SEO to push you into the Top 4.

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The current popularity of Twitter and the fact that Twitter are trying to turn them selves into a real time search engine has made Google stand up and react.

Although we all know that fresh unique content was always essential to build power and authority on your site and also give your new post a freshness boost, there has been a slight tweak in the algo from what I am seeing over the last few days to give further power to fresh posts from authority and powerful sites.

What seems to be happening is that when a new post is created it gets indexed and then placed into a Top 10 position for some highly competitive terms, this ten over the next few days drops off on to page two, three and then eventually disappears from the SERPs.

It seems as though Google have increased the algothirm to bring in fresh results a lot more. Again this is great for that extra little bit of exposure.

A great example of this is the term “SEO”. Firstly it was Dave Naylor’s post about geo targeting which came straight into the Top 10 and then slowly faded out as the post aged and then the Search engine journal post which hit the first page and then slowly started shifting out.

I have also seen this occur on numerous other search terms

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