Mountain View, California — Google’s nascent social network “Google+” has only been out for a few weeks but already overtaking users at an astronomical rate of one million users everyday! The search engine giant is now planning to revive its Real-Time search feature to include data from Google+ and other social media networks that was temporarily discontinued last month, which delivered live stream from micro-blogging platform Twitter, according to Mashable reports.
Google’s specialized Realtime Search was, until last month, the search giant’s method of presenting relevant information from social networks, and most notably from Twitter, Facebook and other social media services in real time. It looked like this:
Whenever a major world event made headlines — ranging from the Royal Wedding to Osama Bin Laden’s death — Google Search would start displaying tweets and Facebook updates from users talking about the recent developments. It made Google’s search engine more relevant during major world events.
However it did not last logn, though. With the recent twist between Twitter’s deal with Google to provide it with the data came to an end in July after it failed to come to an agreement with Twitter for continued access to Twitter’s firehouse of data.
Without a constant stream of tweets, the product was far less useful and Google was forced to discontinue the service, and now speculators, investors, industry analysts and surfers are waiting and watching to see what Google is going to do with this new social networking and video conferencing goodie.
Speaking during a search panel in Mountain View, California, Google Fellow Amit Singhal, acknowledged that “the value the product was providing was not adequate,” indicating that the tool could be improved, despite it already indexing updates from Twitter, Facebook and other social services before it was removed from service, Mashable, reports.
Google, however, at one point suggested that they were interested in continuing both their relationship with the micro-blogging network Twitter and their Realtime search services, but shortly after its social network Google+ was released, the search titan announced it had disabled its Realtime Search service, stating that it “was exploring how to incorporate Google+ into this functionality”.
When asked about if or when Realtime Search would return, Singhal responded by saying that Google Search team is “actively working” on bringing the Real-Time search feature back, adding that the engineers were trying to merge data from Google+ and other sources with the Real-Time search feature. Singhal did not elaborate what the ‘other sources’ were.
Hence, it seems as if Google does not believe it needs Twitter data to deliver a compelling real-time search offering. He also confirmed that Google+ stream will soon be getting its own search engine, a core feature which has remained absent from the platform, which now has more than 25 million users and is expected to surpass Twitter and LinkedIn in terms of user base within a year.
In addition, Danny Sullivan, the panel’s presiding officer and Search Engine Land editor in chief, also asked the panel why the Google+ stream does not have its own search engine (it’s one of the social network’s most desired features).
“We are on it,” Singhal responded.