A Bomb in Oslo? What Google Lost by Ending Real-Time Search

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/a-bomb-in-oslo-what-google-lost-by-ending-real-time-search/242357/

by nbj914 • 15 years ago

84 35 15 years ago

theatlantic.com

streptomycin• 15 years ago

> Google let its relationship with Twitter end during the first week of July

Do we really know that? Couldn't it have been Twitter which didn't want to continue the relationship?

wccrawford3• 15 years ago

http://qualitypoint.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-happed-to-goog...

As Twitter continues to work with other companies, I think we can be pretty sure it was Google's choice.

chc• 15 years ago

How many of those other companies offer a credible Twitter competitor? Twitter's chilly attitude toward third-party Twitter clients makes it seem moderately likely to me that they'd cut off Google's firehouse access to keep it out of Google+.

cube13• 15 years ago

OT: That blog brings me back to 90's web design in the worst way possible. It took me a minute to separate the content from the ads, and I'm still not sure if I actually read the post.

Since Google didn't turn around and immediately release a real-time Google+ search method, I think it's pretty safe to assume that this was entirely business related. It doesn't make much sense for Google to unilaterally kill the feature without having something to replace it.

It's also important to note that Twitter's contracts may not have expired with the other companies, or they were able to reach an agreement that both sides agreed to. Considering that Google was probably using a fairly considerable amount of Twitter's server time(and possibly bandwidth) to make the real-time search possible, I think that it's pretty safe to assume that Twitter wanted more money than Google was willing to pay.

It's also possible that Google wanted more or a better level of access than Twitter was willing to give. Unfortunately, I don't think we'll ever know the exact reasons why this has happened, because of all the NDAs that have to be around the actual contracts.

Either way, I'm still not sure that it's entirely Google's fault. At best, like any business deal that goes sour, both sides are at fault.

kristofferR2• 15 years ago

I'm really glad that it's a rainy holyday with not many people out in the streets, if it was a sunny day with a lot of people out in the streets and full offices it could have been a lot worse.

Some of my friends were in streets near the exposion while the windows exploded and they were quite shaken up.

tallanvor2• 15 years ago

I work very close to where the explosion was. --I've never felt a building shake like that! Needless to say, we didn't know exactly what had happened at the time, but we knew it was bad enough that we should take heed of the fire alarm going off and leave the building.

A few pictures I took of the area, about 1-2 blocks away from the explosion: http://twitpic.com/photos/tallanvor

mattdeboard2• 15 years ago

Good luck, stay safe and avoid public gatherings for the time being.

tallanvor2• 15 years ago

Honestly, my plan is not to let this change my life or routine. If I don't do that, then I've let someone else take control of my life.

Of course, the gym I go to is going to be closed this weekend (they're even closer to the blast site than my office), but they've already posted that they'll be open again on Monday, so I have hope that Oslo - and Norway as a whole - won't let this change their society.

microcentury• 15 years ago

Wowwww that is an insensitive headline.

Edit: This comment generated more debate than I expected, and I should have made it a little more detailed in the first place. I didn't mean to start a discussion on the type of information appropriate to HN.

It hardly needs to be stated that more than one reaction is possible simultaneously, and we don't need to spend the rest of our lives lamenting the event. However I think the headline would be better if it acknowledged that people have been seriously injured, i.e. if it was something more like 'Oslo tragedy highlights absence of RTS information on Google'. The way it stands now it's like writing a headline on the evening of 9/11 talking about the heat resistance of concrete.

wccrawford3• 15 years ago

When a tragedy happens, you don't have to restrict all your thought to the injured people. You can use some of it for other things, like pointing out that Google could have been a good source of information about this event if they had kept their realtime search.

mirkules3• 15 years ago

I noticed that "Explosion in Oslo" article from the front page has been removed. My guess is because it isn't considered "hacker news" - a discussion we've had many times on this forum. So sadly, we have to resort to finding technical reasons to report major current events so they wouldn't be removed.

bh42222• 15 years ago

As a social networking skeptic (no twitter, facebook, myspace, etc.) the only time I am tempted to dive into the social network, is when I hear about this kind of uncensored and real time information.

Lots of sources, perhaps none of them accurate, but tall of them together very informative, all very close to the action, and in real time, that is something impressive. But most importantly, it is something we will never get from traditional media.

Why Google has let this kind of service slip is beyond me.

jarek2• 15 years ago

I've been following this on Twitter, and frankly the search is useful for one thing only: identifying people who tweet from there. For any real information, you have to go directly to their full streams. The search results are cluttered to no end with retweets and it's hard to tell if the retweet you're seeing on the front page of results is of a story from two hours. Just identify the usernames of most commonly retweeted people and get the information from them.

Incidentally Google News has been very useful in locating more official accounts.

jarek2• 15 years ago

As an an example, right now (17:23 EST) the three top tweets for Utøya are from five, three, and three hours ago. One of them contains the unconfirmed/unofficial number of 20-30 dead on Utøya. The best official information available now (retrieved from a specific user's feed) is 10 dead, expected to rise.

zipdog• 15 years ago

This is a decent use-case for the elastic networks that Color touted ... if a social network was pulling all the public activity from those in the vicinity into an automatic, temporary group that people could follow, the result would filter out people just using the hashtag to comment and leave a feed of raw on-the-spot info

antics• 15 years ago

Well, what did Google lose? The title includes a subscript, "What Google Lost by Ending Real-Time Search", and yet, the article has almost nothing to actually say about the subject.

Nothing.

Instead of substantive contribution here, Mr. Jackson gives us simple-minded insinuations: if only Google had thought harder about how people use Twitter to talk real-time about the disasters, they would have realized what they would be missing out on.

Right, Mr. Jackson: as if there is a person in tech who missed the Egyptian riots. As if we all don't know about the thousands of Syrians who named their kid "Facebook".

The fact is, if Google did "end" their relationship with Twitter on purpose, then the real question here is why they would do that. Sticking your head into a search bar, complaining that you can't find Twitter results, and then pretending like no one else notices this is not an argument.

On the other hand, if you lather it up with a recent tragedy, it becomes journalism, doesn't it?

Andrew_Quentin• 15 years ago

Well maybe it did so because it wanted to take an undue advantage of its market share. Now is that anti monopolisitc? Sure it is.

Off with their head I say. Google-s I mean.

panacea• 15 years ago

I say... if HN wanted to discuss Google changing their front-page search results to exclude realtime/twitter-like stuff this isn't the article to promote discussion.

But I suspect it's only on the front page because it's a topical (and terrible) news story that couldn't be on the homepage without some slight tech-angle to make it HN valid.

Cynical.

flexd• 15 years ago

This is seriously scary, the buildings here shook and the blast was huge. I work like 4-500 meters away from the area (as the crow flies), still a bit shaken but luckily everyone at work are okay. Not so much those for those closer as you can see there are no windows left on that building.

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-BUq73ENhYFk/Til_cwxIJeI/A...

Live streaming from BBC/NRK http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14254705

bcl• 15 years ago

I'm not sure what the problem is. I search for Oslo and get current news in the 'news' section just below the map, general info, etc. If I click on last 24 hours I get even more current news.

drzaiusapelord• 15 years ago

Seriously? Twitter? You'd get a lot of noise and less signal.

I don't understand why its so difficult for the author to visit google news or press the news button to do a news search. Legitimate media beats twitter speculation.

kristofferR2• 15 years ago

Here's some footage from the attack location just seconds after the explosion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciQvqBgK-nY

CodeMage• 15 years ago

Seriously, how hard is it to: 1) type "Oslo" in the search text box, 2) press the "Google search" button, 3) click on the "News" link to the left? It's, to use a tired old phrase, as easy as 1-2-3. I find it rather tasteless to grab things like Oslo bombing and turn them into linkbait articles.

zem• 15 years ago

it's not obvious that there is news worth clicking for. ideally, you want google to say "this guy's interested in oslo? i bet he'd really like to know that something of note just happened over there". people who were searching for the news directly would have typed in "oslo bomb".

commandar• 15 years ago

> people who were searching for the news directly would have typed in "oslo bomb".

Actually, the author of the article knew that something had happened in Oslo, but not what. That's exactly the kind of situation where news search is useful. He wants information on current events; news search is where I would expect to find that.

almightygod• 15 years ago

I'm not interested in the article as much as the thoughtful comments from the HN community

absconditus• 15 years ago

How did we ever survive before Twitter?!

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

Interesting, if you did the search on blekko.com (and disclosure here, I work for Blekko) we pick up the Reuters story (we've got a onebox if your search is showing up in the news).

I think what The Atlantic is complaining about here is more that without the Twitter stream, Google has lost access to a signal that they may want to start crawling around looking for stuff.

Given the alleged amounts of robot traffic on Twitter I wonder if they dealt with robo-tweeting trying to drive them to put particular sites up in their news page.

SeoxyS• 15 years ago

Can we please not try to capitalize on the linkbait value of a major terrorist incident?

Seriously, some stories do not have any technological aspect and I find stories like this to be extremely disrespectful of the people who had their lives turned upside down by this incident!

A Bomb in Oslo? What Google Lost by Ending Real-Time Search

Related Stories