Google opens up r-t search
Jinfo Blog

12th August 2009

By Nancy Davis Kho

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Remember back in the Stone Ages, the waning days of the 1990s when you still had to go to trade shows and have booth demos by vendor staff of new product functionality? What a difference a decade makes. Not only do we as software consumers expect instant online access to new features as soon as they're available, now we get to help develop them. According to a post on Google's Webmaster Central blog (http://digbig.com/5baeeb), 'a large team of Googlers' has been working on next-gen architecture for its search technology, designed to improve speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness of search results. Once it's rolled out it will be transparent to regular Google users, 'sitting under the hood' of Google search. But Google isn't taking chances, inviting web developers to start playing with the new search now and send along feedback. The Web Developer Preview version is available at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/, and users are requested to send feedback in to Google. But only serious web developers need participate - or at least only the people who know that the secret password for entering feedback is 'caffeine'. It's apparent that Google is trying to step up its game on real time search, faced as it is with start-up real-time search vendors like TweetMeme (http://tweetmeme.com/) and Twitscoop (http://www.twitscoop.com/). Facebook's recent acquisition of FriendFeed is another sign that established vendors are feeling the heat of consumer demand for improved real-time search on user-gen content (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e22809). Guess it's only fair that Google wants consumers to have a hand in deciding what that search should look like!

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