Some people say that "the real-time web" could be the next generation of post-Google search. Social media tools have greatly increased not just the number of people posting content online but also the speed with which they are able to do so. Do we need a new search paradigm that prioritizes publishing freshness higher than page rank?
Google backers say that Google is already capable of indexing anything online mere moments after it's been published - but the user experience in search doesn't really feel "real time" right now. Movable Type consultant Mark Carey came up with a simple solution this weekend that could change your use of Google more than anything else has in a while.
]]> Carey has written a simple browser add-on that displays the 5 most recent Twitter search results for any search terms at the top of any Google search results page. It's so simple! Why hasn't anyone else done it before now? We don't know, but we installed Carey's script just as soon as we found out about it.
Called "Realtime Twitter Search Results on Google," the service is actually a Greasemonkey script. Don't be intimidated: Carey explains on his blog how anyone running Firefox can add the script to their browser with less than 5 clicks of the mouse. (See our short video on learning how to use Greasemonkey in under 5 minutes, too.)
To be honest, we've been using Twitter search for discovery lately anyway and Google for retrieval of known info at URLs we can't remember.
Carey consults for ReadWriteWeb and also built our awesome FriendFeed comment integration, among other things.
If Twitter is down (as it was again this morning) or if there are no search results available, then the Google page will simply look unaltered. The Twitter results don't load as fast as the Google page does, which is a bit of a bummer, but hardly a deal breaker. That may be a Twitter API issue or it may be an implementation problem, but it's the only shortcoming we see to this otherwise straightforward approach. We'd love to see some additional little features, like a link to the RSS feed on Twitter for search results, some javascript to view more results if the first 5 are valuable and maybe an option to view Twellow user bio search results.
As it is, though, Carey's script delivers real-time search results to Google - just like people have asked for! Thanks Mark! You can follow Mark on Twitter at @mthacks, you can follow me at @marshallk and you can follow the activities of the whole ReadWriteWeb team at @readwriteweb.
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