Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

Google is the master of the static web search. Its link based page rank algorithm works pretty well for the static web.

But how about the realtime web? Page rank is not designed for it and search engines such as google don’t index it.  So this field is wide open. Many think twitter has a great opportunity to own this piece. They have a point but miss the bigger picture.

I think the problem of realtime search has a domain much bigger than twitter. It is not like twitter invented real time conversations on the web. Just think about all the realtime conversations (both synchronous and asynchronous) that takes place. You have all the emails, IMs, chats, activity streams, status updates, comments, blogs, web conferecing etc. You can extend this a bit wider to include the mobile world of texting. You can also go beyond text to voice and video then you get the picture. Most of this stuff in not indexed and there is no good algorithms to rank them.

As I said, this is a wide open opportunity. There are companies that are tackling this for various pieces such as comments, blogs, status updates, sctivity streams etc. But this world can accomodate another google sized company. Google also wants to be that company. Their open social platform is designed to help in this regard. But I don’t see them going at this quite in an organized and focused way. They are tinkering in too many adjacent markets and leaving out a big piece of search which is their core business.

It will be exciting to see who will be the master of the realitme seach.