Ask HN: WTF Is The Value of Real-time Search?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=907268

by sscheper • 17 years ago

39 45 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It seems the only people who care about finding out who said “hotdog” 50 seconds ago are bloggers.

Will someone please explain the value with real-time search? And, cut the bullshit. It’s annoying.

Seriously, if I wanted tweets in my search results, I’d go to search.twitter.com

If I had to explain to my grandpa that he’d need to install a “Webmynd” plugin, which incorporates OneRiot, which contains real-time tweets, he’d literally shit his pants.

On serious note, I've not heard one person explain the value of real-time search. Is it the future, or just hype?

dacort• 17 years ago

It's not the people saying "hotdog", it's the people saying "Oscar Mayer hotdog". Brands are excited about real-time search because it's the first time that nonsensical chatter has actually propagated beyond people's lips on to the Internet where they can monitor it on an ongoing basis. ... Just sayin'

sscheper5• 17 years ago

Yea, definitely brands may benefit; however, if we're saying the people who benefit from this is primarily the Oscar Mayer PR chic, and a couple middle-men ad networks spying on all our conversations, as the lick their lips on what shit they can monetize, wouldn't people catch on after a while?

Relevant search is a long-term value because it solves problems (e.g. you query "how to fix [insert nature of problem]")

Real-time search is basically a voyeuristic tool for brands?

kapitalx• 17 years ago

I'll give you a real life example. I was having some problems with facebook connection and posting. I searched google and all the posts from a couple of days back said that facebook had fixed the problem already. But a quick run to search.twitter.com revealed that many were still having the problem and it wasn't just me.

I'm sure once you see the results in your actual search results, you might see more value in it than it seems right away on the surface of it.

pg• 17 years ago

Among other things, it is the fastest source of news. And in news (as the name suggests), fast is everything.

sscheper5• 17 years ago

In terms of speed, wouldn't it be:

(i) TMZ (heh) (ii) Twitter (iii) After about 30 minutes, google/google news

So Twitter is essentially good for the 30 minute gap.

Obviously there's value with getting news fast. Twitter helps with this. But is there any room left in the real-time market? Now that Google, Bing and Yahoo index real-time conversations, the only thing left is building widgets and features onto Twitter. In otherwords, the oneriot's, webmynds, crowdeye's and kikin's are becoming basically worthless. The once ripe market of Real-time search is now filled by Google(relevancy) and Twitter(real-time).

enjo• 17 years ago

Basically the only thing I find twitter useful for IS real-time search. I watch twitter during Apple Keynotes for instance. We saw a TON of police one night while walking home, I pulled out my phone and hit Twitter and instantly had some idea (if not always completely accurate) of what was going on. Real-time search is useful for, well, finding out what is going on in real-time.

m_eiman• 17 years ago

Fast isn't everything, it also needs to be correct/true. Unfortunately too many journalists/news organizations care too much about fast and too little about correct. Like that flying kid the other week.

axod3• 17 years ago

Accuracy is also nice. Unfortunately, there's no barrier for entry to tweet, and people can be easily persuaded to retweet a story even if it's false.

Unless this is solved, we'll just see spam/false news stories all over twitter, and the service will become useless.

Also I don't think it's the fastest source of news. In the event of 'sudden shock' news stories, I've usually heard via IM/IRC. The fastest source of news is word of mouth, phone, webchat/IM, etc.

The other problem is that once you've heard MJ is dead, would you really want to see 100 bajillion tweets expressing shock at said news. It's very noisy.

netcan3• 17 years ago

Douglas Adams 1999 on 'The Internet'

Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html

jasonlbaptiste• 17 years ago

I think the value out there right now is significantly higher for businesses and brands. That's okay and usually how the cycle goes. "computers" were first for corporations with mainframes, then the "personal computer" came along.

Anything that makes information flow at a significantly faster rate is valuable. For the average every day person, it needs to be presented in a way that's simple and makes sense. Twitter describing itself as the pulse of the internet/world is something I find very powerful.

sscheper5• 17 years ago

They also described themselves as being like a flock of birds. Biz and the gang can get a room and flock all over themselves for all I care, as long as they're providing clear value and making money.

With Google Wave coming out, that will clearly be providing information at the fastest rate. Will that be the next ahem wave?

vladimiroane• 17 years ago

I have my doubts about Google Wave. If Twitter is still complicated for some people to understand (conceptually speaking) I feel not too many will find great value in the Real-time communication feature of Wave.

I don't think search is the killer app for real-time. Real-time communication is already popular with sites like Twitter and Facebook where the value is to see what your friends are doing in real-time. The use-cases for search are not so obvious right now. And you get this from a guy building a RT conversational search-engine.

fjabre• 17 years ago

It's not hype unfortunately.

Even businesses should be worried. Now I need to hire someone full time to tweet, digg, stumbleupon, and start a linkedin group, facebook group, a couple of blogs all the while making sure we're in Google's top 10 for relevant search words.

Whatever happened to build it and they will come? Information overload..? Yes!

iron_ball2• 17 years ago

It almost doesn't seem like a real job, does it? But I have a friend who does internet marketing (mainly through social media and whitehat SEO with minimal ad buys), and about half his pay is commission. As the mainstream comes to see the internet more and more as a participatory social space -- something we nerds have known for years -- that kind of marketing will only become more important.

jlees• 17 years ago

I can't really think of a better way to follow breaking opinions than real-time search. Sure, if you wait a while you can get news indexing from Google, but it's the bias that you want. Especially if, say, you're at a conference/event and want to know what's kicking. We found real-time search particularly valuable for a month-long comedy festival, as it let opinions aggregate, yet much of that information (so-and-so is doing a really cool show this year) wasn't picked up by, say, Google.

seasoup3• 17 years ago

Real time search is not for researching a particular topic, that is what regular search is for. Real time search is used to find out what is happening in the world right now. For example, one day Pandora stopped playing music. I checked my connection and it was fine, then I went on twitter and searched for the word Pandora and BAM! 10 results saying Twitter is down and one results which said "Twitter was down, back up now." So I reload Pandora, and sure enough, it was working.

A second time, my wife was stuck in a traffic jam about 1pm. We thought it might be an accident, but weren't sure, so I searched twitter for the words "accident" along with her location, and BAM! Not only did I get tweets describing the accident, but also a link to an obscure, buried news report on it.

THAT is the beauty of real time search.

tsally• 17 years ago

Also, for real-time search, some users report small to medium size explosions after each query.

joshuarr• 17 years ago

In case you missed it, the difference is that real-time search injects "BAM!" between your query and the generated results.

jmonegro• 17 years ago

If I could upvote you twice, I would.

seasoup3• 17 years ago

No, but my real time search engine that I created to compete with Bing! does. :)

iron_ball2• 17 years ago

searched for the word Pandora and BAM! 10 results saying Twitter is down

You probably meant "10 results saying Pandora is down," but in fact you have characterized my Twitter experience exactly.

sscheper5• 17 years ago

The pain that it solves is also solved by (i) turning on the radio (traffic), (ii)Google maps, (iii) visiting Pandora's blog. Additionally, Google is getting much faster with implementing real-time search results.

My conclusion is that Twitter solves a problem (which isn't as deep as a relevant search problem). Also, because twitter solves the problem, there's no room for the OneRiot's of the world.

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

Of course it's not particularly useful if you're searching for "hotdogs"... unless there happens to be some current event involving hotdogs.

Obviously "real-time search" is all about real-time events. Stuff that's happened in the last few minutes, hours, days.

I've found myself using search.twitter.com for more and more things. For example, if I know some new movie trailer just came out, it's probably easier to find links to it on Twitter search than Google search. Or if some service I rely on just went down Twitter will know about it before Google search.

patio11• 17 years ago

Ordinarily I would be merely skeptical of a business model which a) competes with Google b) in search advertising c) to technically adept folks d) who never, ever click on ads.

The fact that it is a type of search which generates no commercial value is merely icing on the cake.

However, this is not the first time tech influencers have caught the fever for something which refuses to be monetizable. (Lest we forget, real time search is a buzzword now coming to the fore to make a basket of the last buzzwords finally see revenue. Microblogging, etc.)

[P.S. The tone of this post is not what we encourage around here. Skepticism is fine, please be civil in the future. Listen to Smokey the Bear: Only you can prevent Reddit.]

coliveira2• 17 years ago

There is always some way to monetize web content. We just didn't find yet how to. It is the same situation of search in 1998. No one knew how to monetize it correctly. An Adwords algorithm later and we have a multi-billion dollar company.

joez• 17 years ago

Real-time results have a human element to them. It was tweeted by a 'real' person. The result is what is happening in that person's life and they felt inclined enough to tweet it. Top search hits are usually professional blogs, journalist articles or wikipedia. These have lost that personal connection.

auston• 17 years ago

"Real time search" is just a way to make sure you're not the only one experiencing a problem...

ie: gmail is down, cops hassling people @ a political rally, recommendations for parking in Miami Beach, reviews of Movies by real people, etc etc

netcan3• 17 years ago

We can't really know at this point. It's just trying to do something useful with a big pool of information that is a growing part of how we communicate with each other. People do go to search.twitter.com.

This is more a kind of thing where you say 'there must be something useful we can do with this' then the kind of thing where say 'this is the problem we are solving.'

chadaustin• 17 years ago

As a software developer whose customers happen to also use twitter, I leave search.twitter.com open all day. Listening to happy customers tweet about our product is motivating. In addition, it keeps us honest - the negative feedback is unfiltered.

In short, twitter is a great way to ask "How do people _really_ feel about our software?"

chrischen• 17 years ago

It would be kind of useful for seeing status updates of your friends in real time.

kyro• 17 years ago

I used to think that until several months ago when I was on campus and got a call from a friend saying a gunman was roaming about, armed and ready to unload. The first thing I did was search for #uci (my uni) on Twitter and got hundreds of tweets from students around campus who were being herded to back rooms and put in lock down. Honestly, Twitter was the only place I could go to find that sort of news. The media picked up on the story about 30 minutes into it, so I thank Twitter for giving me the heads up to get the hell out of there, else I could have waited around a bit longer to see what was really happening, putting myself in a lot of risk. I mean, I probably would've beaten the gunman to death if he ever approached me, so Twitter really just spared me the discomfort of a week's worth of sore fists.

BlueZeniX• 17 years ago

Wait, your friend called to give you a heads up and you thank twitter for it?

sscheper5• 17 years ago

Seriously. People literally use one stretched example of how a tweet helped them, and then preach it to 40 year-old pr panelists, which then get regurgitated at 140 conferences. An endless cycle of shit.

pyre• 17 years ago

I think he's trying to say that if he hadn't used Twitter to confirm what his friend was saying, he might have spent time mulling around to see what the big deal was. In this case, Twitter was the cure for stupidity ("I'm not going to believe my friend, I'll ignore him!") instead of the generator of it ("I'm helping start a revolution in Iran from my computer chair! Go activist me! Yay!").

axod3• 17 years ago

It allows hipsters to know what is "so hot right now".

For people who can't really think for themselves, they can just search and see what everyone else thinks.

roundsquare• 17 years ago

What you (and some other people) are really saying is that you don't want real-time search to be the default. I'm not sure it should be or not, but I'd agree that we need to have a way to disable it lest we get too much noise.

jfager• 17 years ago

Realtime = Knowing who just trashed my brand, so I can go and fix it before or while everyone's paying attention to the issue. Including 'happening right now' sales in my search for an affordable camera. Hearing news that much sooner than I can hear it today.

Realtime + local = Knowing whether that restaurant I want to go to has seats available right now. Finding out about the wreck 2 miles down the road, so I can exit now. Asking if anyone in a several-block radius has a particular part in stock and getting an answer back quickly.

coliveira2• 17 years ago

Finding people that are interested in your topic, right now. There is certainly a value for that -- especially if you want to sell something.

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

The key question really is: Is anything interesting happening fast enough that I want to see it right now?

Analytical asshole man says no -- that's what newspapers and google are for: the great majority of stuff I care about happened either in the far past (like more than a day ago) or needs to be edited, filtered, and ranked by an agrregation site (like this)

But social psychologist man says yes -- people want to chat real-time, not over a period of minutes even. Rumors get started, grow or die, in a matter of hours. For some stupid human reason people are still tweeting away happily about the meal they ate at McDonalds this morning.

And that's not even mentioning the phenomenon of the tens of millions of bloggers or small etailers who live and die on what's happening on the web right now, this minute.

You are correct in that there is no rational reason for it. And you have missed the point entirely if you think it has no value.

BAM! There's your value.

ivankirigin• 17 years ago

There is a great deal of risk in real-time news. If you search for a term many people are searching for, there is a big spam problem.

Twitter has done little to nothing to fight this spam problem. You could say the same for any of their spam problems - they have quite a few.

That said, I think many big names are being _extremely_ naive in calling the innovation "real time". It is open, social, and public. There is actually no real-time UX in twitter.com - the closest is "N new results" popup on a search page, requiring a click. I have no idea why election.twitter.com hasn't been incorporated into search. Actually, I have a very good idea why they take so long to do *, but I digress.

The point is that it doesn't matter. There is little to no appreciable difference between real-time and 15 seconds lagged for tweets.

kapauldo• 17 years ago

real time search is useful and probably monetizeable, but extremely niche. i have heard plenty of examples, like some described above, where i've felt "yeah, ok, i could see that." but those times when it might be useful might occur twice a year, maybe 3 times a year? so the market is incredibly small. it is most certainly not a threat to google, in my opinion. i am shocked that oneriot has raised $27M and only have a few hundred thousand hits a month. i think real time search is way overvalued in terms of growth potential, and will probably find equilibrium as an occasionally useful niche utility.

Ask HN: WTF Is The Value of Real-time Search?

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