On a scale of importance of from 1 to 10 in early 2009, real-time search may have been given a 5 or 6. But by the end of 2009, the heat was on, and now its given an importance of an 8 or 9.
Real-time search is a hot commodity. Rightly so, because of the power and sheer volume of information available at your fingertips, well, in real-time. The collaboration and syndication of social network information by the big players: Google, Yahoo! and Bing is an indicator of the increasing importance of real-time search.
What’s the big deal about real-time search?
Real-time search enables social data in the form of status updates, posts, and information stemming from social media and social network sites to be semantically flag and produce the information relevantly in a search result. Simple terms: it puts the good stuff from actual people right in front of your face, giving you what you are looking for quickly, instead of digging through long articles written by professionals.
I heard an interesting comment by Brian Solis on a HubSpot webinar today regarding his thought that Google is adapting PageRank for people. This is something he called “The Human Algorithm”. While he didn’t present any hard evidence of this, it is clear that through the vast amount of information freely available to be gleaned from status updates, blog posts and other social information would be of interest to companies from startups to largely known search engines and services.
The question of how these companies can monetize on this is coming to light. X (formerly Twitter), recently announced their first rendition of an advertising platform, is piloting Promoted Tweets with a select bunch of organizations. Startups such as OneRiot have discovered creative ways to monetize by partnering with large blogs such as Huffington Post for example, to display ads for articles that match real-time search requests.
While the general population doesn’t like advertising to be in their face, understandably, real-time search presents a unique opportunity to target a plethora of already built in relevant social data, with creative, but highly relevant social advertising.
Google, Bing, and Yahoo! have their work cut out to increase advertising revenue in their real-time search efforts. The best thing they can do is to continue developing their platforms to make it appealing and simple to advertisers wanting to target real-time data, with relevance.
I’m fine with all of this development around the social search advertising space, as long as its done with usability and user-friendliness in mind. People already show their dislike for advertising through using browser plugins such as AdBlock Plus. Marketers and organizations looking to get their message out need to continue focusing on developing great content and useful information and presenting it in the least obtrusive way possible. That is where the bread and butter is.
Question: What do you think about the real-time search monetization challenges, and do you think so far its being done right?