It’s often said that Twitter’s big advantage over Google is its ability to allow you to conduct ‘real time search’ – if an event is happening right now, you don’t search Google, you search Twitter.
But today Google has announced a series of features that, while still not offering real time search, take it just that bit closer. For me it is the most significant change to Google’s core service in years.
Here’s the video:
This week, while talking to my students about the ability to search by date in Google, the computer assisted reporting blogger Murray Dick mentioned how unreliable the feature was, so I wouldn’t get too excited.
What is new, however, is the ‘recent search’ facility, which brings up results from the past hour or two. [Read more]
One of those rather dry-sounding reports on TechCrunch that some-company-has-raised-some-investment-for-some-technology caught my eye recently, because in par 2 comes this:
“Conveneer is building a mobile platform called Mikz, which will be able to assign a URL to your mobile phone, making the content on your phone accessible on the Web. In essence, it turns each mobile phone into a Web server. Once your phone has a URL like http://joe.mikz.me, other Web applications and services can ingest the data that is locked in your phone, and also your phone can take advantage of common Web APIs. Mikz can pull information off your phone such as your contacts, GPS coordinates, photos, music, ringtones, and other files. It creates a Web interface for your phone.”
Now, it’s one thing to realise that your typical phone now is more powerful than the PCs of a decade ago, but the real power in computers is their networked nature. This technology – if realised – could open up some incredible possibilities. One that immediately occurs is the possibility to make data on phones searchable -mash that up with GPS data and you can imagine saying ‘Find me images or video on mobile phones within 30 miles of today’s major news event’.
There are likely many more possibilities – and I’d welcome your input here on what this would make possible…
“Blogging is a volume game. The more you post, the more chances there are that someone else will link to one of your posts. (Technorati rank is based on the number of recent links to your blog). The majority of the Top 100 blogs tracked by Technorati post five or more times per day, and a full 43 percent post more than 10 times per day. Meanwhile, 64 percent of the 5,000 blogs ranked lower than 600 post two to four times a day, which is still a serious commitment.”
For ‘Technorati’, you can also read ‘Google’, as it also ranks pages based on how many incoming links they have (among other things).
This really only confirms what own experience – and those of millions of others – suggests. But I would add a caveat.
While regular posting definitely increases blog traffic, a well considered, high quality post can be just as effective. Posts like the 21st Century Newsroom series generate a constant stream of visits to this blog, for instance. Another point is that frequent posting can result in good posts being buried beneath other ones when people check their RSS readers.
The best strategy, it seems, is a balance of frequency with quality.
Search Options: Google adds more intuitive search tools, ‘takes on Twitter’
