It's a horrible situation this morning, and let me preface this post by saying that my heart goes out to Tiger, his wife, or whoever has been hurt by this situation. Maybe not so much Tiger but I include him because there are so many conflicting reports this morning. Chances are by now many of you have heard that a woman, or someone, was rushed to a hospital from Tiger Woods' home this morning. Some reports are saying that it was Tiger, some say his wife, others simply say it was a blonde woman. Whoever it is, my hope is that everyone will make a full recovery.
But in spite of the horrible news, this is an opportunity to show just how important Google's Real Time Search released yesterday is. Doing a search for Tiger Woods and clicking on latest (remember to add &esrch=RTSearch to the address if it isn't showing up for you) has the results literally flying in. At the moment (7:00 AM right now) many of the results are from Twitter, which is literally abuzz with talk of what's happening, but it's not just Twitter results showing up. Just within the past few minutes there have been dozens of Twitter posts, but numerous Facebook updates, and as news articles come in, they're showing up in the timeline as well.
I have to say that, sad as this particular story is, Google's Real Time Search is absolutely shining. As an example, if you were one of the millions following the Iranian election protests earlier this year, you know that it was a royal pain in the ass trying to use some of the third party live searches that relied heavily on large amounts of javascript or (gasp!) flash, that you frequently had to shut down your browser and reload the page, and the tools, while great at the time, were really rather clunky. Most of them required you to be logged into Twitter in order to make full use of them as well, which meant sharing your account information with a possibly not-so-honest group of people. It worked, but it wasn't the ideal way to handle information.
Besides the problem with services like Twitterfall, if you wanted information from other sources, you had to have multiple tabs or browsers open, flipping through them frequently to keep abreast of the latest information. You had to watch each news site individually, follow blogs in separate windows, and follow each and every social media site separately as well. Those days are now officially over.
Now, it is all in one place. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, news organizations (haven'st seen any Newscorp stories though :) ) are all streaming into my browser on a single page, updating every second. Google's Real Time Search quite literally takes all the work out of information gathering on breaking news. Who needs wire services (I'm looking at you, AP) when I can do a simple search in Google and have access to more information than I can possibly use.
The only downside I've found so far is that after ten minutes or so the feed seems to stall out. I don't know if this is a result of my browser or if there's a timer built into the code on Google's end, but it's not a horrible inconvenience. It may also be based on the number of entries on a single page. I'm not certain, and it could be a feature designed to prevent your browser from soaking up all of your memory.
But regardless, real time search has finally come of age, and in my opinion has absolutely revolutionized the way people will think about search from now on. Admittedly, I'm something of a Google fanboy, but nobody can deny how game-changing this technology is. I have a feeling that I will be using this feature a lot from now on, and so will a lot of other people.
On a side note, the real time search seems to be enabled by default when using Chrome, however when I use Firefox I have to manually enable the feature by pasting the string above into the address bar. Word is they're rolling this out a little at a time, but if you can't get it to work otherwise, try it out in Chrome.
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