DISQUS

stream · 6 months ago

i think no

Andrew · 6 months ago

Not to put a damper on the notion, but Google's infrastructure technology is *theoretically* incapable of supporting real-time search. It is not even controversial, even among the other companies that use similar technology. Unless they have thrown everything out and started from scratch, I find it highly unlikely that any real-time search of microblogging is more than thin and superficial.

That said, I may be reading too much into this. Yeah, it might be possible for Google to have a search service that works adequately in a very limited scope with respect to microblogging. Nonetheless, the general problem of real-time search of various data streams is theoretically equivalent to another longstanding unsolved problem in computer science, indexing true spatial data, which also remains manifestly unsolved. I don't think many people fully grok the theoretical context of these kinds of applications nor the implications of solving the underlying technical problems.

To do this, Google would be required to discard their entire technology base as a theoretical prerequisite. I do not think many people would make that assertion.

D · 6 months ago

Google already shows a lot of recent results for topics in the news using regular Google search. Google wouldn't have to throw out what it has to add on a section for tweets, just like it adds in a section for news results.

Peter Antypas · 6 months ago

Andrew is right. Several years ago, eBay asked Google to provide them with search, and Google failed. The reason was (as Andrew pointed) that Google's algorithm is optimized for tons of slowly changing content. They simply can't handle massive real-time streams. And, no, there's nothing spectacular about indexing News. There's actually very few news streams out there (Reuters, AP, etc). Compare that with potentially millions of tiny documents (tweets) per hour and you have enough to keep CS geeks busy for years.

Howard H · 6 months ago

It would be interesting having adsense/adwords on twitter.

Chris · 6 months ago

I agree with Howard H. Why not put some adsense on my twitter page, and give me a cut? I would post night and day, if I could make some money off of it.

Chris
http://worstiphoneapps.blogspot.com

Amir Khan · 3 months ago

Hi Dean, Thanks for the post. Very useful, I referenced this article in my own post today:
http://apoint2share.com/?p=43