I Want My Old Real-Time Google Search Back…
One of the drawbacks to the always evolving real-time web is the constant integration of different hubs that utilize real-time content. The most recent? Google allowing for real-time search that pulls in tweets from Twitter (and soon to be even more Facebook content.) You would think that having all this information at your disposal would make you feel like you were on top of Mount Olympus. But, alas, this wealth of information at your disposal quickly becomes a burden versus a blessing. Put quite simply – there’s too much information now to sift through and all that indexed content is getting less and less relevant.
I’ll walk you through one such instance of how the “Old” Real-Time Google Search was quite effective:
MY GOOGLE ALERTS SCENARIO
Google Alerts is a god-send when it comes to finding up-to-date info on yourself, clients, competitors, and just about any person, place, thing that is identified by a keyword. If you’re not using this function on Google, you should be It’s a great resource to have search results on a predefined topic delivered to you daily or in real-time as it’s indexed by Google.
Previously, I was content getting a nice little email that summarized all the relevant keyword search updates for that day. Over the last few months though, I changed a few of my alerts to ‘as they happen’ to tap into the more real-time nature of Google search indexing. However, this still wasn’t ‘real-time’ in the same way Twitter and Facebook updates were.
Then, over the last few weeks, Google decided to get serious about ‘real-time’ and started to integrate Twitter and Facebook into the search results. Sounds great right? All real-time data delivered right to your inbox. Well unfortunately what sounded great on paper absolutely sucks in practice. Here’s why…
When I was using Google Alerts, I was getting great info from brand sites, news outlets, etc. I’m going to assume that most people who use Google Alerts use(d) it this way as well (if not, call me crazy in the comments…) I was searching for information that I felt I could trust or at least get a link to a site for to get more information as needed. However, now my Google Alerts are being infiltrated by tweets, Facebook posts, etc. that are just mentioning a keyword and don’t have any real relevance against my initial Google Alerts keyword intent. The way I’m looking at it is that I’m now getting the ‘conversation’ along with the ‘research’ and I’m not digging it.
I used to have a very clear separation of church and state:
For ‘official’ research, I would trust Google Alerts to index blogs, sites, etc. for the content I needed.
For ‘conversation’ research, I would just search Twitter and used Tweetdeck or Twhirl to track what I wanted.
Now, everything is a mess. I’m getting almost 3X the volume of Google Alerts delivered via email and most of them are filled with nonsensical partial tweets, status updates, and incoherent babble. Unfortunately, now I don’t even bother checking most of the alerts I initially setup as it’s too time consuming to even start going through them all. Keep in mind, I have about 75 alerts setup and whereas I used to get maybe 25-30 emails with relevant info daily, I’m now getting over 100 because some searches are pulling up multiple times throughout the day when someone ‘tweets’ a keyword I’m tracking. Am I the only one that thinks this is a mess now?
I’m a huge proponent of the real-time web and feel that the way we find and interact with information now has fundamentally changed forever. It’s exciting to see how this evolution will continue to occur but can somebody please bring my old Google Alert functionality back? If not, I’m going to have to go back to getting my information the old school way…
Tags: Facebook, google alerts, google search, Real-time search, Twitter
