Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

The rise of real-time search: What Twitter and Facebook integration in Bing and Google means for you

Last week we learned that Microsoft had scored a deal with Twitter and Facebook to allow status updates to be searchable from Bing. Shortly after, Google announced a deal with Twitter as well.
These partnerships are a sign of the growing importance of the real-time web – that smorgasbord of sites and services which allows you to broadcast whatever is going on in your life right now. Other examples include the social network Foursquare, which lets you inform your friends when you’re at a particular venue, and a variety of sites that let you instantly upload audio and video from your phone.
But while the real-time web is becoming an invaluable resource for tracking breaking news stories and gathering perspective on important events, the vast number of updates involved is leading to quite a bit of noise online. With real-time updates, we’re basically where the Internet was in the mid ’90s before the rise of Google – tons of compelling content with imperfect ways of getting at it.
This is where the Twitter and Facebook deals come in: Real-time web searching is the next step of evolution for web search, which makes it a market that both Google and Microsoft will fight to the death to corner.

We won’t be seeing these real-time updates on Google for a few months yet, and Bing just has a Twitter beta up right now, but here a few reasons why I believe this first foray into real-time search indexing is important – both for users and the web:

Search engines will become a one-stop shop for tracking conversations

Right now tracking conversations happening on Twitter, Facebook and other such services requires you to deal with their internal search engines – which often vary wildly in terms of quality and functionality. It also means you have to repeat a search across multiple sites to gain a full sense of the online conversation. This probably isn’t an issue that average users are facing right now, but with the rise of real-time web services it is a problem worth tackling.
Twitter and Facebook integration with Bing will solve this issue, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Google finds the need to follow suit. I would also expect future sources of real-time information to be integrated in a similar fashion, although search engine providers will have to be careful so that these results don’t distract too much from standard website searches.
It would also allow Bing and Google to compete with the new generation of social media search engines and aggregation services like TweetMeme.

Finding interesting and important updates will become easier

The integration of real-time info in Google and Bing wouldn’t be useful if it was just a direct pipe of everything coming out of those services. The real value comes from their ability to sort the massive firehose of information in real time, similar to the way both search engines rank website results. This is something the internal search engines on Twitter and Facebook can’t accomplish (yet).
As Ad Age reports, Microsoft is working on a point system for determining value among tweets:

Longer tweets, those that contain added information and links, and tweets from users with many followers on Twitter will be assigned a higher value, say, than a tweet like “that sucks,” [Microsoft executive] Mr. Mehdi said. Similar tweets, the kind that overwhelm the service on a daily basis, on topics such as “balloon boy” or President Obama’s Nobel prize, will also be filtered.

I would wager that Google has something powerful up their sleeve as well – perhaps an evolution of Page Rank, Google’s revolutionary algorithm for indexing traditional web pages.

Real-time info could help with indexing traditional websites as well

I wouldn’t be too shocked if this influx of real-time data could be fashioned into something that could help traditional web page indexing approach the holy grail of “near real time” as well. Updates on major websites are already speedily indexed on Google, but the availability of real-time data could help them quickly index popular articles from smaller sites. On the whole, it has the potential to make traditional web page indexing more robust.

Closing thoughts

Even if some of my predictions end up being completely bunk, there is no denying that the addition of real-time updates into the two leading search engines is a significant milestone for the web. Finding anything on the Internet was a chore before Google came along, and now a decade later we’re seeing the next big step for Internet search.
While some may argue that the real-time web may actually end up doing more harm than good, I personally just see it as a larger-scale version of the early web publishing years, which was followed by the early blogging years. Not all of the updates were important, but those platforms matured into things that changed the world. The real-time web is just the next logical step, which makes being able to search it all the more important.
About the author:
Devindra Hardawar is a tech/film blogger and podcast host. You can find him writing at the Far Side of Tech and Slashfilm.

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

The Five Most Common HTTP Errors According to Google

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Sometimes when you try to visit a web page, [...]

Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Page load time and response time are key met [...]

Can gzip Compression Really Improve Web Performance?

Last updated: February 26, 2024 The size of the web is slowly growing. Over [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free