Google Realtime Search is nothing new. For months it has existed as its own area within the search engine’s navigation to search for things happening in realtime. But up until now, that has meant mainly Twitter (thanks to Google’s data deal with that company). But earlier today, it appears Google flipped the switch to make Realtime Search a lot more useful. Namely, they’ve added results from services like Quora, Buzz, Gowalla, and yes, even Facebook.
As pointed out in this Quora thread, it looks like Google flipped the switch to include the data from the services listed above (as well as others) this afternoon. The fact that Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo and CFO Marc Bodnick voted up this Quora posting suggests this did in fact just happen today.
As the Quora user notes, “Google Realtime Search is indexing Quora activity such as asking Questions, adding Answers, upvoting Answers, and submitting Posts.” And that’s great news for Quora. But it’s equally great for the other services now included in the realtime feed Google surfaces � namely because they also sometimes surface these results on the main Google.com as well.
We’ve known for sometime that Google was working with Quora to generate better social results. It’s interesting that Buzz apparently wasn’t included in these updates before but is now. And Gowalla is interesting in the fact that this data is public. For example, I just searched for myself and found my own check-in this evening (it’s public on Gowalla.com as well � unlike Foursquare, which only shows this location data when you connect with someone).
But the really interesting addition is Facebook. Before you get too excited, it appears that only Facebook Pages data is surfaced. So it’s not actually personal profile data. And obviously all of this Pages data is public, which is how Google is getting it. But previously, Google has distanced themselves from crawling the content of their big rival, even when it is available.
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