One of the great things the social web provides us with is the ability to follow breaking news as it happens. There’s something particularly captivating about watching news stories unfold before your very eyes.
Image via flickr.com/photos/jarchie
Back in in December 2009 Google launched ‘Google Realtime Search’ in an effort to capitalise on the web’s new found hunger for live news, providing users with way of searching the social web from the comfort of their Google search bar.
The search tool pulled in data from social channels, including Twitter and Facebook, and served them up in realtime, much like you’d experience on a live social networking stream. The service was particularly useful for following breaking world news – Osama Bin Laden’s death, for example.
As good and as useful as the service was, Google took it down in July after failing to agree terms with Twitter over the use of it’s data. Although data was still being pulled in from Facebook and a few other sites, RealTime Search was clearly missing the noise of the Twittersphere.
However, one of the great things about being Google is the ability to create your own noise.
According to a blog post made earlier today by social news foghorn, Mashable, Google Realtime could be making a return with the help of it’s recently launched social network, Google+.
When Mashable asked Google representative, Amit Singhal whether Realtime Search would be making a return, he confirmed that the search giant was “actively working” on reviving the product and also revealed that they we’re testing realtime search data from Google+.
It makes perfect sense for Google to incorporate data from it’s own community, but will there be enough of it to deliver compelling content for realtime search? Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
