So, I’m at Chicago SES and see Michael Streko tweet about how Google has integrated Twitter into regular search. Sure enough, Search Engine Land has an article about the topic.
Being a former practitioner of the “dark arts”, I immediately start running some searches and was pretty shocked at what I found. Funnily enough, Dave Naylor was giving a presentation and mentioned this new real time search integration (in regards to the reputation management issues it creates) and pulled up the results for his name at the same time I tweeted him to get to the speaker room so we could fool around with what I was seeing.
For the next thirty minutes or so, Dave, myself, Michael Gray and Frank Watson sat around doing a few searches and we were all a bit surprised at what we found and how Google couldn’t have foreseen the problems they’ve just unleashed.
Real Time Spam
The most obvious thing was the ability to real time spam Google’s results. A quick search for Viagra showed the real time results at the very top of the SERP, right under the news results… so I do a tweet about Viagra and drop a link to Sugarrae.com. Sure enough, my tweet and my clickable link shows right at the top of the Google SERP.
Google pulled the anchor from my sites title tag. Additionally, Twitter hashtags are also clickable. A quick search for Miley Cyrus gives you visibility to her fans if you drop a tweet offering up great Miley Cyrus tickets with a link (however links don’t always seem to go through), hashtag or phone number (I actually got two calls after the tweet scrolled by).
Can you hear the bots churning? I know I can. I can’t imagine that Google couldn’t have not only foreseen these issues, but also had tested their filters much more extensively.
Real Time Libel
A more obvious danger is the reputation management angle. If you do a search for a person’s twitter handle (we’ll use Mike Martin aka googleandblog as an example) you’ll see not only his own tweets, but tweets mentioning him. If your Twitter handle is the same as your company name, you suddenly have a real time compliment or complaint feed showing up to anyone who searches your name on Google. (And just think of what this means for keyword based Twitter accounts.)
Imagine if you have a disgruntled employee who takes to tweeting badly about your company all day long in a fit of anger. Imagine if your competitor wants to play dirty. There is no way to track who owns a Twitter account, and you may find yourself having to spend a lot of time to try and stop and/or remove bogus complaints or comments from appearing. By the time you get it situated, the damage may have already been done with no one to hold accountable for defaming your company’s name.
Real Time Danger
I think the aspect of this “real time search” that frankly, scared the hell out of me the most, is the ability for predators to reach out to children with no way to stop them. At this point, I see no way to remove real time search from showing in the results. Safe search, even on the highest setting, to date, does not remove them. Suddenly, anyone can talk to my child while they surf Google.
Let me repeat that.
SUDDENLY ANYONE CAN TALK TO MY CHILD VIA GOOGLE AND I CAN’T STOP IT.
Google has suddenly become an enabler for predators. Need an example?
Let’s say your kid is searching for information on Sesame Street. A wholesome show, right? Right. Until some freak is suddenly talking to your child and asking him to call them.
So Michael says to me, “what four year old uses the phone”? Ok, let’s target your angst filled, misunderstood teen then who is incredibly mad at you at the moment that you won’t let her see her boyfriend anymore. She does a search for Miley Cyrus to find “The Climb” lyrics so she can emo out for the night…
Google has just allowed strangers into my home and given me no way to lock the door, aside from removing my child’s access to Google. The default search engine for almost every computer I see, including those in schools.
Of course, it’s not just Twitter appearing in the real time results, but to date, Twitter seems to be the most spammable, most potentially libelous and most potentially dangerous.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg folks… Google may think they’re ready to deal with the ramifcations of personalized search. Yet, in 30 minutes time, we were able to find multiple, multiple exploits (much more than listed here, but if I told you about everything, the guys might shoot me).
Edited to add: I did a video interview with WebProNews the day this was published that covers this topic as well.
About the Author
Rae Hoffman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Outspoken Media as well as the author of the often controversial Sugarrae Blog.
Get social with Rae at Sphinn | Twitter | WebmasterWorld
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{ 102 comments… read them below or add one }
Those are some truly frightening examples you have there. I hope your Canadian version of the Department of Child & Family Services doesn’t storm your home thinking your some sort of predator now.
Glad to see this is being brought up. I pointed it out to some friends, but this definitely needs to be addressed.
wow. i’m sure google will start dialing back their inclusion of real time results after a few complaints. at web 2.0 expo they had a similar issue when they had a live tweet stream show up behind the keynote speakers…the next day they filtered all the tweets before showing them.
Aww. Sugarrae, you whited out my twitter name in the example! Too bad.
I do find it hilarious though that people called you. That tweet was only showing up for about 1 minute or so.
…Off to abuse this new found power.
Great examples. What’s to stop someone from just building up an account and just auto-Tweeting every 5 minutes with a juicy link on their preferred keyword? I think we’ve finally carried the obsession with newness too far. Recency is not a quality factor.
Agreed. Just because I was the last person to comment, doesn’t mean I added anything to the conversation. How much can you add to the conversation with 140 chars?
Real-time GOOG is the search equivalent of a Flash splash page…a worthless animation that doesn’t deliver any content or value.
I did some testing on my own. If you tweet too many times about a topic, Google won’t show them all. After about 4 or 5 on a topic, I didn’t see mine showing up anymore.
Yeah that seems about right here too!
Still too easy to game, if that’s the case: just randomly rotate your topics per day and you’ll always be on the first page of Google
That may not be Google doing that it could be Twitter. If you send the same tweet over and over again Twitter will identify you as spam and remove you from the stream. You might try searching for your tweets on search.twitter.com because your test might have gotten you banned from the conversation.
Wow. That’s actually quite scary.
I can’t think why google thought it was a good idea, but did they ever think that maybe SEOers pushing legitimate businesses wasn’t such a bad idea at all? It’s like Google are saying “Do you know what? A lot of people around here are bored with nothing to do, lets screw up our search engine so we can fix it!”
Will somebody please think of the children?! :)
Seriously though, I don’t expect this feature to be around very long. It has very little utility stuck in the middle of the SERPs like that. I doubt most people want to see this here.
I’ve seen it at the #1 place on the SERPs for some terms.
Fantastic article. I watched your tweets come in as @designmeme and I were doing some of our own tests. I’m actually really shocked about the vulnerability this allows, and the loss of control one would have over what their child sees online.
What could benefit SEO, utilizing many positive techniques, can really do a lot of harm. You have done a commendable job at showing how weak the real time search result function is.
Udi Manber should be removed from Google. He has done nothing for the organization except ruin the UI that is Google serps.
The real time rollout has been pitiful.
I am going to go out on a branch here and be completely honest for a moment. I have tested this feature a good deal for the last hour, and NONE of my twitter bots are showing up in the SERPs. They do show up in the Twitter SERPs, which means that Google is doing some type of filtering here. As you have pointed out, they aren’t very good at it yet, but at the same time the accounts that you tested it on don’t have a history of bot like behavior…….mine do.
That’s exactly right. sugarrae is/was likely a trusted account. Just like CNN could get a top ranking page pushing any spam they wanted to on account of their overall reputation, you could probably get away with a spammy tweet here or there from a trusted account. But if my testing is any indication, good luck trying to get your tweets in the onebox with a spammy account.
Well Kevin, this is just a prime example of how all marketing is best done when you present the illusion of authenticity.
Good spam never looks like spam.
I’d take that a step further and say that spam isn’t spam. Good spam is on topic and provides some value.
It’s not good spam anyone is worried about here.
blargh. *good* spam isn’t spam.
Yes but you are not a spammer – and Google probably knows that. What I’m saying is that your tweets appeared in the RTS box because you have a (very) good followers/following ratio and probably some other characteristics (a realistic bio, a very high number of replies ratio, etc.) that make you look trustworthy.
I doubt it I will be able (soon…) to create a bot that makes it to the first page of GG for ANY keyword. Otherwise this will be one of the biggest failures of the decade by Google…
i think the word here is more like *reputation* than spammy/bot-driven, the same way reputation weights in heavily on the SERP ranking. I have a non bot driven, high follower to following ratio, never spams, never links to bad neighborhoods, but it doenst much of a reputation. I couldnt get my tweets to show up in the onebox.
i think the word here is more *reputation* than spammy/bot-driven. The same way reputation weights in heavily on the SERP ranking. My twitter account is not bot driven, has a high follower to following ratio, never spams, never links to bad neighborhoods, but it doesn’t have much of a reputation. I couldn’t get my tweets to show up in the onebox.
I definitely understand the cause for concern, but I think that the outcome is inevitable. There will always be trolls, spammers, and outright predators looking for ways to manipulate a given system (whether that’s the local playground or your personalized Google results).
Google didn’t even this “real time” game. They’re just a new player that happens to be the largest mouthpiece on the internet. Either way, the game isn’t going away. It’s only going to become larger and more encompassing (think Google “real time” results flashing through directly into your brain synapses whether your awake or asleep).
My advice would be to let Google know about it, as you’ve done with this post, but then move onto more fruitful ventures (like exploiting real-time search for marketing benefit or teaching your child the skills he/she needs to not fall for predators, either online or offline).
I’m sure it looks at followers to followed ratio, number of posts, and even whether or not you have a default image. All of these can be used to determine a good “quality grade” of a twitter account – at least my Bots all use that information :)
Well it looks like from Rae’s example they are pre-parsing the shortened URLs, which means they are also looking at affiliate tags, and spam worthy domains.
Yep, I agree with you Kevin. I don’t see this staying for too long. Plus, once spammers figure out how to exploit it… Google will notice.
Funny I posted/Tweeted about this very thing the other day…
http://twitter.com/balibones/status/6440328518
http://twitter.com/balibones/status/6440349244
Still trying to figure out how they determine which businesses Twitter streams get added to the search results, and why. I saw one business showing their Tweets (and my @reply) earlier today when you searched for the company name, but now they’re not included. Maybe it’s just taking a while to make its way to all the datacenters… but other searches (like “designmeme”) have been consistently showing the tweets in the search results without interruption.
If there’s a way to opt-out of this service for a businesses I’d love to know!
I can see a new algorithm factor coming soon: QDNDF – Query Does NOT Deserve Freshness!
Websites have Page Rank. People will now get a Freshness Rank.
I can’t wait for the AdWords to come into play.
aren’t all the those tweets already accessible via other searches? I think real time is hear to stay, with obvious modifications coming.
You are right, Warren. All of these tweets are available via Twitter’s own search and the flurry of other real-time search startups. What Google is doing is just increasing the visibility of the content.
Also, just as Twitter is finally stepping up their efforts in battling spam, I think Google will find ways to do so as well. They’ll find ways to determine if an account is abusing the system or not, just like they have with black hat SEO tactics.
Great look into this Rae! I posted about real-time search this morning, and wanted to get into what this will surely mean in relation to spam. I’m glad you did instead. Great screen captures and commentary…love it.
Yes, I hope that Google can institute some sort of “authority” rank for tweets in the “Latest” search stream. Perhaps they can do something like what klout does to rank authority and kill spam. Though using authority could also squash the little guys so they need to be careful. Must not be easy to rank in real time. Google is smart though so they should figure something out. We don’t want folks using trending keywords to spam us.
Switching to “Past hour” will eliminate the spam and looks to do some sort of intelligent ranking. This is near-real-time at least. Do the miley cyrus search under “Last hour” and the links are still very current and look pretty clean of spam.
I have a very obscure secondaryTwitter account that should have no credibility at all in Googles rankings, and I was able to stuff a Tweet into that Miley Cyrus live result with no problem.
This is a fantastic article. Good find :)
I LOLLED.
I was wondering WTF were these pedo messages we were seeing….
so you were searching for miley cyrus lyrics? haha!
lol nope I was following Rae http://twitter.com/rishil/status/6504107379 http://twitter.com/rishil/status/6504211455
Ha, I wondered the same thing the other day, thought her account had been compromised. Should’ve known better!
As a parent who lets my young children use the Internet unsupervised, and uneducated, this scares the hell out of me. Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children?! So, when do we storm Google HQ and expose them as the evil-doers that they are?
Haha, a terrific explanation as to why I was seeing so much odd activity in my tweet stream today, figured you were either up to something or someone had hijacked some accounts. Excellent post.
This is yet one more step in the wrong direction for Google. They’ve gotten insanely out of control in recent months with all the crap they’re displaying. It is, by far, however, the biggest opportunity for spam, since most of the other changes are likely going to be dominated by big brands. If and when they do any kind of “authority” filtering for real-time, that too will be dominated by those.
Good angle on the Google real-time search feature. How could Google have missed the boat on this…?
Sorry Google, but the presentation of the search results is completely wrong! Why do you place it within the organic results. you don’t do that with AdWords because it’s different data. Tweets are also very different from the organic results. Tweets should be presented in another column.
My thoughts exactly. Side column for real-time index. Or how about “GoogleRT” beta for Real Time…
I hadn’t thought of the implications beyond the clutter. The terrific examples in this post do a great job of illustrating the problem Google has on its hands right now.
Wow, that is a bit crazy how easily you were able to rank those. Scary thought.
The “search” wave has been a good ride for Google. And, is it now starting to crash on the beach – slowing rolling back out to sea? The ability to find “timely” content has always been Google’s strength. But relevant info is what most surfers want and I too often find the most relevant info on page 2-3 using Google after sifting through the first page of BS marketing & directory sites that figured out how to harness the bot – much like your examples. Was Microsoft’s intention with Bing to provide more “relevant” content and skew away from just timely?
Really good job. I was thinking about this the other day, had some of this thought out, but you managed to do what 99% of us don’t — prove it. It just seems too simple for Google to not have accounted for. I guess that is exactly the point Alan & Brian are making above.
Here, Bing, have some more market share. We have plenty!
You are right – it looks like total garbage and so open to abuse.
Rae, thank you for writing this. Thank you for pointing out all the things Google obviously hasn’t thought of. Not only is this real time crap a nightmare, but the personalized results for everyone is as well. For the first time I see that Google can mess up enough to fall. I am sure you saw this today… “Arrogance may ultimately be the thing that pushes Google off of the chair” per @davenaylor #seschi”
Awesome. You might, also, get a kick out of the broadside I just unleashed over at the Warrior forum:
http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/153958-google-hypocrisy.html
Wow, that is some really scary stuff…
Ironic how Google have done so much to make ranking difficult for “regular” spammers and now they’ve opened up a new opportunity for instant page 1 presence…. Not only that, but it also looks liket twitter-spamming is probably far more effective at getting traffic this way than “natural” twittering.
Rae
Your still scaring me. Brilliant fencing with Google although I am not totally sure how to exploit in the real world since it seems likely to burn twitter identities pretty quickly without much ROI. I suppose the true predator doesn’t care about that.
I have to admit that the first thing that went through my mind was also how badly this could be abuse -my, how jaded we’ve become.
Thanks for the investigation and for pointing out some great learnings with regards to these new, interesting development.
Looks like seo’s will be fisghting for spots on page 2 as the organic listings get pushed further down the page.
I just finished covering this on my blog.
I’m all for Google hopping onboard, and attempting to capitilize on a new and growing technology. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, that’s the foundation of business. Change. Moving forward.
But I feel Google has been a little bit wreckless in its implementation of this technology. There’s definitely been little regard for the quality of results, and I think that can only be a counted as a negative towards Google.
I can also sympthasize with your concerns, and I must say they’re pretty valid. It’s a little bit surprising that Google hasn’t done more, when it has in the past.
There’s no doubt that Google will find a clever way to solve that. Let’s just wait a few days/weeks.
Filtering tweets by popularity (number of RTs, authority of the tweetguy) is just an example of many possible solutions.
I hear that google have got this thing called adwords…what happens if a paedophile ring all chip in a load of cash and bids on ‘Jonas Brothers’ or something…
they could then set up a link to their paedophile grooming site of death!
WHAT WERE GOOGLE THINKING? WONT SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?
yeah anyway, back to work…
Its good to see so many people discussing this new Google feature. Overall I’m happy to see it and think it will prove to add value for people doing social and topical searches. I share concerns about abuse of this new feature by all kinds of shady characters and I hope filters for both parents and businesses will be available sooner rather then later.
Rae if my daughter ever came across those kind of real time results i would be pissed, she regularly searches for “games for girls” and although sounding perfectly innocent to her real time spammers could quite easily distract her 8 year old mind. I am not always there to supervise her every action and i have high filters set when she is on.
I did run a little experiment of my own yesterday afternoon and within 30 minutes i was able to set up a yahoo pipe that grabs a keyword brand mention and replace it with whatever i wanted + an rss to twitter + well you can guess the rest, real time results constantly updated with spam all thanks to eveery tweeter who mention a particular brand name that i might have taken a dislike to. Bad bad times.
With Google just releasing this feature, I think they’ll be hard at work on it pretty quickly. Also, the fact that real-time search is still a few clicks in is something to be considered. You have to select that you’d like the “latest” updates before it starts pulling in real-time results.
I think the biggest implications for real-time search availability is company reputation (as you described). Google has now made it very easy to find out what the latest buzz is about a company you may be interested in working with. For example, a company may have a great website and good rankings, but I could find out through the real-time search that they recently had a major customer service meltdown. That may lead me to consider doing business with someone else.
I’m horrified what may happen now that live search is here and appears in the (once trusted) Google SERP’s results.
Is it now open warfare for black hat and guerrilla marketing practitioners to spam Google?
Will our children be safe from predators now that we can’t block live search?
With Facebook changing all their privacy settings and not telling the general public what will really happen next year a breach of our privacy?
We may all find some of the Tiger Woods live search comments amusing, but what is real damage being done here? Are we going to see a celebrity trial by Twitter in the future with the world watching?
These turn of events are worrying. Thanks Google for brining this down on us!
Good job at explaining the cracks in the Real time search. They should get their act together and put a strong spam filter on, I can hear the spam bot starting too…
I am wondering, haven’t Google noticed it and made any corrective actions. Its far better to make preventive actions than contingency one’s. I hope it would be settled soon by Google.
Looks like Google pulled the plug on this already as they circle the wagons & refigure this out…thanx to Rae ;)
I enjoyed this post and some of the comments. Relevance is not simple under any circumstance. Real-time makes it a million times harder as Google, too, has recognized. There are some emerging solutions thought that do look promising. Have you seen the semantic, real-time search engine TipTop?
Is it me or does Google seem to be rushing new products to market lately?
First they shove personalized search onto millions of people without asking or really letting them know. Disaster.
Then they roll this crap out which does not seem to be really showing up for searches with any rhyme or reason. Disaster
Caffeine is coming in a few weeks. We’ll have to see.
And we are noticing local results coming in for so many odd queries these days. Sometimes the local IP targeting that they do to serve these is hundreds of miles off. And when we search for real local queries like “Italian Restaurant” no local results come in. Disaster
They are just giving Bing the perfect opportunities to slide in with a better search experience.
This is freaking out over nothing. Real-time results are not qualitatively different than any other results; the same abuses could be accomplished with almost any other method of putting text on the internet. The only difference is that they show up faster, but here’s the thing: they also disappear faster.
Now excuse me, I’m off to tweet something that scares people into paying attention to me.
>>>The only difference is that they show up faster, but here’s the thing: they also disappear faster.
And any spammer worth his salt could have thousands of accounts running tweets simultaneously and essentially make it so that one of their accounts is always showing.
I’m glad to see there is value to contributing to social media platforms. If this continues, and google stops this, it would be a sad day for us all.
Phronk, the truth is that these live feeds are much easier to abuse (at the moment) than the conventional search.
Twitter is free and anyone without much knowledge could simply tweet to spam/insult etc. and appear on the first page of Google. If I wanted to get my site to the top of the search results for viagra, before now, I would’ve had to invest a lot of time/money to spam backlinks. It would’ve taken more time as well as it would leave a bigger footprint for Google to catch you.
Something like 90% of tweets are meaningless babble, that figure is set to increase…
Meh, they’re still not qualitatively different, and the ease of getting spam on the front page is counterbalanced by how fleeting it is.
Plus, I’m sure Google will have an algorithm to promote quality updates, just like they do with more enduring content.
The child abuse point, especially, is just needless fear mongering.
Sorry, I don’t consider exposing a potential danger to kids “fear mongering”.
I just don’t think the danger has increased. We do need to be aware of these dangers, but phrases like “Google has just allowed strangers into my home” is an exaggeration. The internet has always allowed strangers into the home of anyone who wants them there, and the onus has always been on parents, law enforcement, and decent people to do that in a safe manner. Results that show up faster than they did before doesn’t change that.
I’m glad there are people like you watching out for dangers to children, but I can’t get on board with the exaggerated, sensationalist tone of this article.
But neither of our opinions matter; let’s see if there’s any actual evidence that spam, libel, or child abuse increase as a direct result of a few new search results.
I actually disagree with you on the parenting thing; our kids have very limited access to resources but one of the things we allow them to use for homework purposes is Google. Infact, at the computer labs, the kids are actively encouraged to use Google.
With other search results the changes happen relatively slowly over time and are traceable, with this instant search result the traceability for parents is not there. I can not repeat my child’s search query and see what they were looking at earlier that day.
While I agree that the risks are relatively small to any one individual child, I also disagree with calling it needless fear mongering.
The inability to reproduce search results is a good point. That is something that makes it different than traditional search results.
But again, I’d like to see actual evidence before freaking out.
One could argue “then it will be too late,” but I think the risk is low enough (and Google must agree) that we can’t hold back a tool that will be very useful for 99.99% of people just because of a vague possibility.
I do think it would be nice to have it optional (and as a separate option, not confounded with SafeSearch).
Even if the real time search did not show up with the total Safe Search lock down I’d be happy with that.
ARE YOU LISTENING GOOGLE? HELLO? :)
I think the only way to show evidence that it can be used for nefarious purposes is for something bad to happen, so I agree with the OP that it’s something that would be best to avoid.
I just posted why I think that we’re sort of overreacting to this. I don’t think the spam will make a dent, and it’s not really a threat to children.
http://www.dotcult.com/were-overreacting-to-google-real-time-spam
I posted a blog about my own tests on spamming Google’s Twitter results. It looks like you can really dominate the results. Google And Twitter Spam Disaster
While i would not suggest the author intended to instill fear, I do disagree with the purported dangers the new resources for their index.
What google appears to be doing, on the surface mind you, is gathering more data to use in its index so users can get more options to its search results.
The danger you mention is to advertisers losing space to a preferred service which may be competitive. This seems a reasonable response to what could be a threat to the current seo practices one is following on any given day. Competition is at the heart of the marketing industry, not rising to a challenge may result in losing your effectiveness.
I’d like to read an article where we discuss how this new service can be leveraged by marketing professionals. That is where this discussion should be driven to.
As for this new functionality being a danger to our children, I couldn’t agree more. With that said, the children that are endangered are typically the children of parents who themselves do not take the time to educate themselves on the different dangers of the public web space.
The article appears to infers that the lack of education for our children, in this subject, should deter innovation or growth. I consider that assumption to be more of a danger then the reported issue at hand.
Now if your child has been educated in this area, this new service should not pose a greater threat to the safety of our children. It is no less dangerous then logging into twitter itself or doing a site search from google. There is no perfect content filter and there never will be, accepting this is key to understanding the options we present to our children.
As a parent myself, I have already begun to set the ground work for my five year old to one day be an active user of the internet. It’s never too early to start teaching.
One last note, google will continue to add more resources to index. They are already in talks with the major social networking sites to find ways to come to an agreement with what they can take without stepping on users privacy rights. Watch for new privacy policies and terms of service from all the main players in this area this year.
Good luck.
- Devhead -
I think the number of blocks, report as spam, and other metrics are available through the Twitter API. These could be the foundation of a Freshness Rank.
Knowing Google, they could even incorporate the FR of your Follows/Followers into the equation.
spot on Rae..never ever would’a even thought of that…but that does sound like G needs to respond on that responsibility….
least to me in my world!
:-)
Jim
Great observation about co-opting paid placement, but, as far as the “real time danger” goes, you are the true “real time danger” to your child if you’re letting a 4 year old search the web unattended. Seems like this post is nothing more than a disingenuous attempt to improve your page rank by appealing to the mommy blogger community.
PS – The ability to game this real time search function nicely compliments SideWiki, No?
As a parent of 3 small children these concerns are not ridiculous, they are not fear mongering and they are certainly not exaggerated. For Google to have included this obviously flawed search OPTION, without the possibility to TURN IT OFF is ridiculous.
Besides the safety aspect mentioned, I personally have no interest in seeing ANY twitter, facebook or other social network garbage in MY search results. If they do not allow me the option of removing this crap from my searching I will be moving to another search engine, I’m sure other people feel the same way. Are you listening GOOGLE?
What a bunch of FUD and strawmen! It’s very telling that the loudest initial critics are of realtime search are SEO/SEM types playing the, ‘oh noes, google just let in Pedobear,’ card.
I predict embarrasment upon looking back at this post in hindsight within a few short months when ‘every’ search engine is doing this.
Many thanks for your high quality heads up, Rae. I had no idea about this issue, but you’ve left me with a lot of info and ideas. Thanks to @SpikeTheLobster at ScrawlBug for pointing me in your direction. It was worth it! Best regards, Paul. :)
really nice points. But I am not sure every second person who keep on twitting will come on first page of Google. Google must have think about this.
@Phronk:
Sorry, I just don’t think the usefulness has increased. We do need to be aware of useful enhancements, but a phrase like “…(this is) a tool that will be very useful for 99.99% of people” is a total exaggeration…unless you really meant to say “…(this is) a tool that will NOT be very useful for 99.99% of people”.
Now THAT’S a statement I can agree with!
Hey Rae,
I think you should be much more concerned about Google’s non-disclosed censorship — I wrote about how Google censors its “real time” results here:
http://stat.eu.com/google-offers-a-search-product-with-censored
:) nmw
hahaha that’s an awesome post, one of the best yet!
This is going to encourage “comment spam” and nothing more. Social networking is for networking with people, not inundating people with “buy my stuff” comments. Twitter is becoming less and less useful for connection with people since so many people spam it with “free” advertising, promotion and marketing.
I wish Twitter would segment their social system from the promotion/marketing/advertising segment of their membership. It’s so off-putting.
Spam is spam.
It’s amazing how the obvious is overlooked. Some of the examples you are showing is flat out scary. Most will be much more subtle but ALL will be spam in some sort of fashion.
Rae:
I didn’t consider the dark side of real-time search like you did, but I did look at a bunch of business models, technologies and opportunities in my analyst report of the subject that I published earlier this week. Would love to get your feedback on it.
Real-Time Search and Discovery of the Social Web – 20 page PDF
Very good examples, i think these real-time results should be listed only from “trusted sources”. Not sure how good the filter is but I hope everything will be fine because the idea is good in my opinion.
Great article :) This is absolutely a horrible idea, and I’ve hated this Twitter thing ever since they introduced it.
And even if it was somehow 100% safe, why would I want to be viewing some random person’s tweets about Miley Cyrus in the first place?
Wow !!!
did they fix it or not yet?
I think they are now brainstorming these issues. They definitely seem to apply more weight to the tweets by highly influential people though. Hopefully, they will find some solution.
those are some dirty Sesame Street tweets there girl.