Google & The Real-Time Generation

(Article first published in June '10. It has been modified slightly to suit its publication on our site)

Something pretty major has recently happened in the internet world which will have major ramifications for how we all go about promoting our businesses online. Google has gone real-time! Well actually it's not quite real-time, but it's as close as we'll ever get to it. Have you noticed that the Google homepage has changed and now there are extra options to the left? Those options, casually slotted in to the left-hand side of the screen have sent ripples across the internet world and a lot of marketing companies, including this one, are working hard to figure out how best to exploit it.

Maybe you're reading this and you don't have the foggiest what I am talking about, so the best thing to do is back-track a little.

Search Engines - The Way They Used To Be

Search engines were invented to help individuals find useful sites. In the very early days of the internet you could literally remember all the available sites. Then sites sprang up that had links to the other sites, so you no longer had to remember them or write them down. These listings sites became the directories that we know online today and as the number of sites grew they also grew in complexity, with tens, then hundreds, then thousands of categories and sub-categories.

These directories eventually became what we know as search engines and believe it or not they were originally indexed by human beings! Eventually this task became just too long-winded and finally the automated search engine arrived. Google didn't invent this, but they certainly took it to a new level of intelligence and complexity and the rest, so they say, is history. However, despite their search and indexing algorithms being tremendously sophisticated, their results were always essentially a snapshot in time. What I mean by this is that if I updated my website with a new web page today it could be up to a month or two before that change was picked up by the search engine crawlers and the page was shown in the search results. Sounds like a long time, but consider that today it is estimated that Google has trillions of web pages in its index and has to track them all on a regular basis.

This time lag caused a problem. How could search engines cope with very current news. Think about newspapers. If there is a major news story and people search for it, they want to see relevant results from today not a month or even a week ago. So Google pioneered a number of initiatives that allowed web content providers to tell Google if they had pages that were updated regularly and the frequency of those updates. If you're a geek then you'll want to know that this was when XML Sitemaps arrived.

Now you could get search results relating to today, which was fine for a while, but then blogging, Twitter and the real-time age arrived.

Search Engines - The Real-Time Generation

With the dawn of social media came the demand for real-time content, the problem was that unlike websites, where content is bunched together, social media content is contained in millions of micro-fragments, so indexing them all is a mammoth task. However, Google (and other search engines) went about creating links with the major social media engines and so today you can see updates from literally seconds ago.

Don't believe me? Just go to Google's search page and type in "Currency", then on the left menu click on the word "Latest". Shazam - you've just gone real-time baby! You can see the updates appear literally as they happen.

Real-Time Results - The Implications For Business Owners

The bottom line is that if you were wondering how having a Twitter, Facebook or Blog account would be of any use to your business, the above is a very simple and practical example of how. A lot of consumers haven't picked up on this yet, but when they do they'll start using it in earnest. Publish a special offer and it's instantly available, globally if you want! Got an interesting product or service? Tell people through Twitter and anyone who is interested will know about it.

How are you going to make the best use of Real-Time Results?

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Franco De Bonis has worked in the field of sales and marketing promotion since 1990 and was most recently the global marketing manager for a major international technology company before setting up The DG Group in January 2007.

The DG Group is dedicated to delivering all the marketing solutions any company may require. Whether it's a website or leaflets and brochures, or even some product packaging; The DG Group will manage the whole project and even provide guidance along the way.

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