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Ask HN: WTF Is The Value of Real-time Search?
It seems the only people who care about finding out who said “hotdog” 50 seconds ago are bloggers.
Will someone please explain the value with real-time search? And, cut the bullshit. It’s annoying.
Seriously, if I wanted tweets in my search results, I’d go to search.twitter.com
If I had to explain to my grandpa that he’d need to install a “Webmynd” plugin, which incorporates OneRiot, which contains real-time tweets, he’d literally shit his pants.
On serious note, I've not heard one person explain the value of real-time search. Is it the future, or just hype?
- dacort 17y agoIt's not the people saying "hotdog", it's the people saying "Oscar Mayer hotdog". Brands are excited about real-time search because it's the first time that nonsensical chatter has actually propagated beyond people's lips on to the Internet where they can monitor it on an ongoing basis. ... Just sayin'
- sscheper 17y agoYea, definitely brands may benefit; however, if we're saying the people who benefit from this is primarily the Oscar Mayer PR chic, and a couple middle-men ad networks spying on all our conversations, as the lick their lips on what shit they can monetize, wouldn't people catch on after a while? Relevant search is a long-term value because it solves problems (e.g. you query "how to fix [insert nature of problem]") Real-time search is basically a voyeuristic tool for brands?
- kapitalx 17y agoI'll give you a real life example. I was having some problems with facebook connection and posting. I searched google and all the posts from a couple of days back said that facebook had fixed the problem already. But a quick run to search.twitter.com revealed that many were still having the problem and it wasn't just me. I'm sure once you see the results in your actual search results, you might see more value in it than it seems right away on the surface of it.
- pg 17y agoAmong other things, it is the fastest source of news. And in news (as the name suggests), fast is everything.
- sscheper 17y agoIn terms of speed, wouldn't it be: (i) TMZ (heh) (ii) Twitter (iii) After about 30 minutes, google/google news So Twitter is essentially good for the 30 minute gap. Obviously there's value with getting news fast. Twitter helps with this. But is there any room left in the real-time market? Now that Google, Bing and Yahoo index real-time conversations, the only thing left is building widgets and features onto Twitter. In otherwords, the oneriot's, webmynds, crowdeye's and kikin's are becoming basically worthless. The once ripe market of Real-time search is now filled by Google(relevancy) and Twitter(real-time).
- enjo 17y agoBasically the only thing I find twitter useful for IS real-time search. I watch twitter during Apple Keynotes for instance. We saw a TON of police one night while walking home, I pulled out my phone and hit Twitter and instantly had some idea (if not always completely accurate) of what was going on. Real-time search is useful for, well, finding out what is going on in real-time.
- m_eiman 17y agoFast isn't everything, it also needs to be correct/true. Unfortunately too many journalists/news organizations care too much about fast and too little about correct. Like that flying kid the other week.
- axod 17y agoAccuracy is also nice. Unfortunately, there's no barrier for entry to tweet, and people can be easily persuaded to retweet a story even if it's false. Unless this is solved, we'll just see spam/false news stories all over twitter, and the service will become useless. Also I don't think it's the fastest source of news. In the event of 'sudden shock' news stories, I've usually heard via IM/IRC. The fastest source of news is word of mouth, phone, webchat/IM, etc. The other problem is that once you've heard MJ is dead, would you really want to see 100 bajillion tweets expressing shock at said news. It's very noisy.
- jasonlbaptiste 17y agoI think the value out there right now is significantly higher for businesses and brands. That's okay and usually how the cycle goes. "computers" were first for corporations with mainframes, then the "personal computer" came along. Anything that makes information flow at a significantly faster rate is valuable. For the average every day person, it needs to be presented in a way that's simple and makes sense. Twitter describing itself as the pulse of the internet/world is something I find very powerful.
- sscheper 17y agoThey also described themselves as being like a flock of birds. Biz and the gang can get a room and flock all over themselves for all I care, as long as they're providing clear value and making money. With Google Wave coming out, that will clearly be providing information at the fastest rate. Will that be the next ahem wave?
- vladimiroane 17y agoI have my doubts about Google Wave. If Twitter is still complicated for some people to understand (conceptually speaking) I feel not too many will find great value in the Real-time communication feature of Wave. I don't think search is the killer app for real-time. Real-time communication is already popular with sites like Twitter and Facebook where the value is to see what your friends are doing in real-time. The use-cases for search are not so obvious right now. And you get this from a guy building a RT conversational search-engine.
- fjabre 17y agoIt's not hype unfortunately. Even businesses should be worried. Now I need to hire someone full time to tweet, digg, stumbleupon, and start a linkedin group, facebook group, a couple of blogs all the while making sure we're in Google's top 10 for relevant search words. Whatever happened to build it and they will come? Information overload..? Yes!
- iron_ball 17y agoIt almost doesn't seem like a real job, does it? But I have a friend who does internet marketing (mainly through social media and whitehat SEO with minimal ad buys), and about half his pay is commission. As the mainstream comes to see the internet more and more as a participatory social space -- something we nerds have known for years -- that kind of marketing will only become more important.
- jlees 17y agoI can't really think of a better way to follow breaking opinions than real-time search. Sure, if you wait a while you can get news indexing from Google, but it's the bias that you want. Especially if, say, you're at a conference/event and want to know what's kicking. We found real-time search particularly valuable for a month-long comedy festival, as it let opinions aggregate, yet much of that information (so-and-so is doing a really cool show this year) wasn't picked up by, say, Google.
- seasoup 17y agoReal time search is not for researching a particular topic, that is what regular search is for. Real time search is used to find out what is happening in the world right now. For example, one day Pandora stopped playing music. I checked my connection and it was fine, then I went on twitter and searched for the word Pandora and BAM! 10 results saying Twitter is down and one results which said "Twitter was down, back up now." So I reload Pandora, and sure enough, it was working. A second time, my wife was stuck in a traffic jam about 1pm. We thought it might be an accident, but weren't sure, so I searched twitter for the words "accident" along with her location, and BAM! Not only did I get tweets describing the accident, but also a link to an obscure, buried news report on it. THAT is the beauty of real time search.
- tsally 17y agoAlso, for real-time search, some users report small to medium size explosions after each query.
- joshuarr 17y agoIn case you missed it, the difference is that real-time search injects "BAM!" between your query and the generated results.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- iron_ball 17y agosearched for the word Pandora and BAM! 10 results saying Twitter is down You probably meant "10 results saying Pandora is down," but in fact you have characterized my Twitter experience exactly.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- tlrobinson 17y agoOf course it's not particularly useful if you're searching for "hotdogs"... unless there happens to be some current event involving hotdogs. Obviously "real-time search" is all about real-time events. Stuff that's happened in the last few minutes, hours, days. I've found myself using search.twitter.com for more and more things. For example, if I know some new movie trailer just came out, it's probably easier to find links to it on Twitter search than Google search. Or if some service I rely on just went down Twitter will know about it before Google search.
- patio11 17y agoOrdinarily I would be merely skeptical of a business model which a) competes with Google b) in search advertising c) to technically adept folks d) who never, ever click on ads. The fact that it is a type of search which generates no commercial value is merely icing on the cake. However, this is not the first time tech influencers have caught the fever for something which refuses to be monetizable. (Lest we forget, real time search is a buzzword now coming to the fore to make a basket of the last buzzwords finally see revenue. Microblogging, etc.) [P.S. The tone of this post is not what we encourage around here. Skepticism is fine, please be civil in the future. Listen to Smokey the Bear: Only you can prevent Reddit.]
- coliveira 17y agoThere is always some way to monetize web content. We just didn't find yet how to. It is the same situation of search in 1998. No one knew how to monetize it correctly. An Adwords algorithm later and we have a multi-billion dollar company.
- joez 17y agoReal-time results have a human element to them. It was tweeted by a 'real' person. The result is what is happening in that person's life and they felt inclined enough to tweet it. Top search hits are usually professional blogs, journalist articles or wikipedia. These have lost that personal connection.
- auston 17y ago"Real time search" is just a way to make sure you're not the only one experiencing a problem... ie: gmail is down, cops hassling people @ a political rally, recommendations for parking in Miami Beach, reviews of Movies by real people, etc etc
- netcan 17y agoWe can't really know at this point. It's just trying to do something useful with a big pool of information that is a growing part of how we communicate with each other. People do go to search.twitter.com. This is more a kind of thing where you say 'there must be something useful we can do with this' then the kind of thing where say 'this is the problem we are solving.'
- chadaustin 17y agoAs a software developer whose customers happen to also use twitter, I leave search.twitter.com open all day. Listening to happy customers tweet about our product is motivating. In addition, it keeps us honest - the negative feedback is unfiltered. In short, twitter is a great way to ask "How do people _really_ feel about our software?"
- chrischen 17y agoIt would be kind of useful for seeing status updates of your friends in real time.
- kyro 17y agoI used to think that until several months ago when I was on campus and got a call from a friend saying a gunman was roaming about, armed and ready to unload. The first thing I did was search for #uci (my uni) on Twitter and got hundreds of tweets from students around campus who were being herded to back rooms and put in lock down. Honestly, Twitter was the only place I could go to find that sort of news. The media picked up on the story about 30 minutes into it, so I thank Twitter for giving me the heads up to get the hell out of there, else I could have waited around a bit longer to see what was really happening, putting myself in a lot of risk. I mean, I probably would've beaten the gunman to death if he ever approached me, so Twitter really just spared me the discomfort of a week's worth of sore fists.
- BlueZeniX 17y agoWait, your friend called to give you a heads up and you thank twitter for it?
- sscheper 17y agoSeriously. People literally use one stretched example of how a tweet helped them, and then preach it to 40 year-old pr panelists, which then get regurgitated at 140 conferences. An endless cycle of shit.
- pyre 17y agoI think he's trying to say that if he hadn't used Twitter to confirm what his friend was saying, he might have spent time mulling around to see what the big deal was. In this case, Twitter was the cure for stupidity ("I'm not going to believe my friend, I'll ignore him!") instead of the generator of it ("I'm helping start a revolution in Iran from my computer chair! Go activist me! Yay!").
- axod 17y agoIt allows hipsters to know what is "so hot right now". For people who can't really think for themselves, they can just search and see what everyone else thinks.
- roundsquare 17y agoWhat you (and some other people) are really saying is that you don't want real-time search to be the default. I'm not sure it should be or not, but I'd agree that we need to have a way to disable it lest we get too much noise.
- jfager 17y agoRealtime = Knowing who just trashed my brand, so I can go and fix it before or while everyone's paying attention to the issue. Including 'happening right now' sales in my search for an affordable camera. Hearing news that much sooner than I can hear it today. Realtime + local = Knowing whether that restaurant I want to go to has seats available right now. Finding out about the wreck 2 miles down the road, so I can exit now. Asking if anyone in a several-block radius has a particular part in stock and getting an answer back quickly.
- coliveira 17y agoFinding people that are interested in your topic, right now. There is certainly a value for that -- especially if you want to sell something.
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoThe key question really is: Is anything interesting happening fast enough that I want to see it right now? Analytical asshole man says no -- that's what newspapers and google are for: the great majority of stuff I care about happened either in the far past (like more than a day ago) or needs to be edited, filtered, and ranked by an agrregation site (like this) But social psychologist man says yes -- people want to chat real-time, not over a period of minutes even. Rumors get started, grow or die, in a matter of hours. For some stupid human reason people are still tweeting away happily about the meal they ate at McDonalds this morning. And that's not even mentioning the phenomenon of the tens of millions of bloggers or small etailers who live and die on what's happening on the web right now, this minute. You are correct in that there is no rational reason for it. And you have missed the point entirely if you think it has no value. BAM! There's your value.
- ivankirigin 17y agoThere is a great deal of risk in real-time news. If you search for a term many people are searching for, there is a big spam problem. Twitter has done little to nothing to fight this spam problem. You could say the same for any of their spam problems - they have quite a few. That said, I think many big names are being _extremely_ naive in calling the innovation "real time". It is open, social, and public. There is actually no real-time UX in twitter.com - the closest is "N new results" popup on a search page, requiring a click. I have no idea why election.twitter.com hasn't been incorporated into search. Actually, I have a very good idea why they take so long to do *, but I digress. The point is that it doesn't matter. There is little to no appreciable difference between real-time and 15 seconds lagged for tweets.
- kapauldo 17y agoreal time search is useful and probably monetizeable, but extremely niche. i have heard plenty of examples, like some described above, where i've felt "yeah, ok, i could see that." but those times when it might be useful might occur twice a year, maybe 3 times a year? so the market is incredibly small. it is most certainly not a threat to google, in my opinion. i am shocked that oneriot has raised $27M and only have a few hundred thousand hits a month. i think real time search is way overvalued in terms of growth potential, and will probably find equilibrium as an occasionally useful niche utility.