Is Google Going More “Real Time”? Stephen Gately Case Study

This morning I got ready just like a normal Sunday and logged onto the laptop.

I opened up Tweetdeck and logged in. I’m then confronted by the news via Twitter and a few Facebook updates that Stephen Gately (from Boyzone) had suddenly passed away whilst on holiday in Majorca with his partner.

My thoughts and condolences go out to his friends and family.

Now, I’m not usually the one to use this type of news to create a blog post around it but this is the first time I’ve come across this type of thing whilst searching for a particular topic on Google.co.uk at least.

Now, the initial information I had was from someone I’m following on Twitter and that was “RIP Steven Gately”. Now, I naturally did a search to find out how this happened. First stop Google.

Why Google when I found out via Twitter? Well two reasons:

It’s still an automatic thing for me to use Google to search for stuff. I’m starting to utilise Twitter Search more but it’s still not my first port of call.
I wanted to get straight to the full story rather than snippets of what has/hadn’t happend, so I thought a search in Google is more likely to bring up sites such as the BBC.

There are a few ways I could have found out the information but I still chose the search engine rather than going direct to the BBC for instance. This could just be down to how I personally tend to navigate the internet, but with the advent of “live” search, it was worth noting the results I got from the three main search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing. Please note, these results are all for the .co.uk versions and searched whilst in the UK. These searches were also conducted roughly an hour after the news broke (the first I was aware of it).

Google Results

OK, so lets start with Google. I went extremely broad for the search and went for “Stephen Gately” rather than any reference to his passing. This is the result I got:

As you can see – the top result is the latest news followed by the official fan site. No major surprise there, but take a look at the meta description on the Wikipedia result. You’ll notice that the date (17 March 1976 – 10 October 2009) is updated in the Meta Description. Now unless you have a site like Wikipedia, you could change your meta description today and it wont show in the search engine results for a few days. This shows how often Wikipedia is crawled by the search engines and in turn updated in the results.

Further down the page, is something I have never seen before and that is the introduction of Google Trends within the search results. To give a brief explanation – Google Trends allows you to see the current popular search terms that are being entered into Google. It’s worth keeping an eye on even if you do get some real odd searches!

If you click on a term, it will take you to an explanation of the search term and any news related stories based around it. You can get some great information from there.

Here you can see it included in the results:

The results also include blog results, video results and as mentioned above – the Google Trends. As you can see, the trend line spikes massively and at the time of writing this was the 17th most popular search – in the world – conducted on Google. Bearing in mind this was about an hour after it happened, this is a massive spike. As the rest of the world becomes aware, this will only continue to rise.

Yahoo Results

Interestingly, if we compare the results of Yahoo:

This is the Yahoo homepage and naturally, they have the breaking news at the front and include the story about Stephen Gately so they have the advantage of being able to include news stories right up front compared to Google.

If you were to search for Stephen Gately rather than click on the news item however, you’ll be sorely dissappointed with the results if you were looking for the latest information of his passing. Here is a screen shot of the results I got with the same search I did on Google:

Not one result is the latest news about him passing away. What is also very surprising, is the meta description of the Wikipedia page. Remember Google had already crawled, indexed, and updated the page with the latest information in the Meta Description? Yahoo still has what is likely to be an older version of the meta description.

If it hadnt have been for the fact that Yahoo has the real estate to publish latest stories on their home page, it would have been a seriously dissappointing experience for the user. The only thing I can say, is that once confronted with the information on the homepage, the user is unlikely to conduct a manual search whilst the information is right there.

Bing Results

Now onto Bing. I decided not to use BingTweets (search for something on there and you also get Twitter results) as this is not known by the average user and I believe it to still not be fully released. So, with a search again for “Stephen Gately” about an hour after the news broke, I had these results:

Still no where near Google’s results, but better than Yahoo – the news results are at the top, and some video results at the bottom. However, it’s still lacking in it jumping out at you. The Google results where presented nicely, up to the minute and showed what was going on, whereas Yahoo and Bing were very dissappointing. Yahoo was only saved by it being covered on thier home page.

There is no doubt live search is coming, and coming quickly. This is the first time I’ve seen such a result on Google – without changing any search options, or doing anything other than typing in a top level generic term for a breaking news item.

If Google was to also incorporate more live channels, alongside the historic and established information, it could prove to be a very powerful feature that would only strengthen their hold on the search industry. The others – need to catch up. They know it, but aren’t showing it yet. This is certainly warming up to be another search engine war.

What about Twitter and Facebook results? Well as expected on Twitter, it is top trending topic, and will only gain more ground as people Retweet, @Reply and Tweet about it themself as more and more people wake up to the news.

Facebook Results

Facebook has really worked on their search functionality of late, and it has been touted as being a big competitor to the “traditional” search engines. I guess this is worth another post – but the short of it is, that you can search what everyone on Facebook is saying about a particular search term. Here is a screen shot:

This search was conducted a couple of hours or so after the event, but every time I looked back at the screen there were still more and more results flooding in. Notice on the very top result you can click to show any feedback such as “likes” and comments.

Conclusion

OK, so what can we learn from all this? Well it shows that news isn’t solely generated by the news outlets like it used to be. Sure, we always had local gossip and news that was spread via word of mouth – but with the available channels such as Twitter and Facebook, we can now magnify that spread and reach by untold amounts.

The fact that the search engines are responding to this shift in search habits also shows that they believe it to be a very big thing in the future for how we search the internet. This form of “live” search won’t replace the traditional results – but it will enhance them.

What does this mean to you? Well blogging, Tweeting, Facebooking and YouTubing are all ways of getting discovered like never before, so if you or your business are refraining from using these channels you need to start seriously considering it.

Once again, my wishes go out to everyone who knew Stephen Gately closely.

Please, as always – let me know your thoughts in the comments below – even if it is just about Stephen rather than the post itself.

Is Google Going More "Real Time"? Stephen Gately Case Study

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