More to Real-Time Search Than Twitter

Google’s Seattle site director Brian Bershad told TechFlash.com, "There’s relatively little data in Twitter," Bershad said. "I think if you could take a Twitter-like service and combine it with a lot of other data sources about the users, you might be able to come up with something more interesting."

Some have taken this to mean that Google has no interest in real-time search, but to me it sounds like perhaps they’re just thinking bigger than Twitter Search. And why wouldn’t they? Twitter already has search, and Google (at least for now) doesn’t own Twitter.

Featured Users in Twitter SERPs

He said it’s "still pretty early to pontificate" but noted that combining more information from users like Google Latitude information for example could lead to greater benefit.

Well, let’s see, what other real-time information is out there about people? Oh yeah, the largest social network in the world – Facebook just went real-time. What about something like Digg’s Bigspy, which shows upcoming stories as soon as people Digg them?

These are just a couple that come immediately to mind. I’m sure there are plenty of other real-time elements that can be thrown into the mix.

As data portability services like Facebook Connect and…hmmm, Google Friend Connect (which just launched its API), I bet there will be plenty of real-time, data-driven socializing going on all over the web (much of it not limited to 140 characters), and somebody may want to be able to search that stuff for a variety of reasons (like online reputation management for one). I find it hard to believe that Google has zero interest in this.