Bitz in Motion

I am really digging Google real time search. I have always found the most useful aspect of Twitter to be it’s real time search capabilities.  Unfortunately as Twitter has become more popular the noise has increased, especially with high profile events like the iPad keynote.  For every interesting comment or article tweeted there are 10 useless re-tweets of some snarky comment or product give away.  You don’t want to just block all re-tweets either, as sometimes they contain useful information. Google real time search was launched a couple months ago and does a remarkable job of taming Twitter’s crowded streams.  Google applies a version of it’s pagerank and spam algorithms to determine the importance of every tweet.   The more followers you have the more important Google determines you to be.  If your followers have lots of followers that is even better. I have to say, the result is truly amazing if your goal is to find interesting/thoughtful articles or points of view. I really noticed this when Apple announced the iPad.  Twitter was overrun with redundant posts like “Apple iPad to be priced at $499″ and retweets of jokes about feminine hi-gene products.  I went over to Google live search, typed in “iPad” and let the algorithm do it’s thing.  Immediately I was finding posts and links that actually had useful information.  One post was a link to an article about Apple’s new A4 system on a chip and what exact pieces of hardware it was using.  Another was a Tweet from a guy working with the iPad SDK. I think separating the wheat from the chafe will become more and more important as the internet and social networks grow and Google is uniquely positioned to satisfy our filtering needs. Check out real time search here: www.google.com/rltm/ipad Further reading: www.blog.hubspot.com/Twitter-Authority