My first thought when I heard that google was going to be meshing real time search with it’s usual results was, cool, now we’ll get some real fast results reflecting what is happening at the moment.
But yesterday I read an insightful post from Rob Birgfeld on SmartBlog On Social Media called Reality setting in: What Google’s real-time search means to businesses. He brought up some very interesting points. In his post he used a different example, but what happens when my mom (or dad, let’s not be sexist while being ageist, one cliche at a time please) searches for Nordstroms to find out their hours and gets 350 links to posts about what random people bought at Nordstroms, issues and experiences they had? How much patience will mom expend trying to find a simple link to the store? Frankly, does she even know there is more than one page of results?
Mulling this over, I see 2 things happening.
Number one: Nordstroms now NEEDS to pay for placement in google search. I’m sure they already do, they are a giant company, but what about the smaller companies who have managed to do a bang up job with their SEO and have a long tail of positive comments, articles and mentions on other sites? Where do their current natural results end up?
Number two: somewhere within the depths of Nordstroms’ PR/Marketing deptartment, one of more employees (previously a bright-eyed social media pro) is furiously blogging, posting, commenting and tweeting not only about Nordstroms’ various marketing initiatives, but about simple things like store hours and locations in order to control the real time results.
Depressing, no?
What are your thoughts on real time search results? Should they be included in the broad search or segmented out?
