We’re now into Day 2 of SMX Sydney and I finally have power so can get back into the live blogging.
Greg Grothaus from Google’s web spam team is up now to talk about Real Time Search. Greg starts by talking about Real Time Search and shows examples of what it looks like. He says events like the Iceland volcano are perfect examples of how RT search is relevant. People who are tweeting from airports about flight delays etc.
Challenges to RT Search
– Speed
– Volume
– Relevance
What makes a relevant query? Things like:
– was that an earthquake?
– did a celebrity just die?
– is Greg’s talk worth going to?
Relevant Query Signals
– model of query frequencey spikes
– modell of update frequen cies
– language models
– spam bot traffic models
If you want to see trends in RT Search, go to Google Trends.
Relevant
– regular / frequent updates, stuff that matters
– unique content: RT less interesting than original
– updates point to useful links
– followers matter less than interaction
– Content, not hashtag soup #OMG #SMXrocks #mytweets #readthis #omnomnom
Gave the example of a power outage in Palo Alto, where people have no PCs so pull out their phones and do searches in Google for “power outage Palo Alto”. Google RT Search can show them instantly information the cause of the outage etc, therefore RT search is very relevant.
Get Indexed
– make sure your tweets FB Buzz are public
– blogs – rss feed, ping API
– websites – use an XML sitemap (see sitemaps.org), specifically <lastmod>, <changefreq>
Social Search
– type in a search query and you can see what people are talking about right now about that subject.
Social Media Impact
– Global web usage is up, up, UP
– Australia has the highest time per person social media usage In.The.World. 7 hours per week??
– The impact of social media can no longer be denied and marketers need to be paying very close attention.
– Your customers are interacting more with their social network.
– Less about optimizing your content, more about getting your users to write/communicate about your brand or products.
– Think of Google Trends – use the information to your advantage.
