Google Realtime Search Gets New Name, Its Own URL, And Kick In The Pants

In a move that emphasizes the increasing importance of realtime search, Google has just given their realtime search function a kick in the pants, moving it from the lowly “Updates” sidebar on regular Google search to it’s own URL http://google.com/realtime, which was broken this morning but now seems to be redirecting to http://www.google.com/realtime?esrch=RealtimeLaunch::Experiment.

In addition, Google has added some supplementary tools to help you sift through news stories, blog posts, Twitter, Facebook, and Buzz updates including …

  • Geographic Refinements, or the ability to search by location
  • Conversation View, or the ability to search through an entire conversation thread over time
  • Realtime Alerts or the Google alert in your email functionality extended to realtime updates

This is a good move for Google in the sense that search is its core competency. While Twitter currently has the monopoly on serving up realtime updates, its search feature only goes back four days, whereas Google search reaches back till February of this year and is more reliable overall in my experience.

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan points out that the product name has also gone from “Real Time” to the cleaner “Realtime.” The demo below (with the very interesting choice of “earthquake” for an example) below.