Real Time Search – A Game Changer

Microsoft’s Bing and Google just reached separate deals with Twitter for rights to index the Twitter data as it occurs… in real-time.

This is a game changer on a couple of levels.

1. People are going to tweet just to get into Google’s search engine results pages (SERP’s). It’s a game changer for companies that are looking to get into the Google and Bing search results pages. I don’t see the results in Bing yet, though some have said they are showing up for them. Google has yet to integrate Tweets into their results – but it will be interesting to see how they go about it.

Tweeting might have just become important to me again, depending on what the results show, and whether they are prominently placed. Links in Twitter will probably pick up some sort of value in Google’s eyes based on the number of times the link gets passed around – retweeted.

2. Less and less space is being used for organic search results in Google especially. Some companies are going to get pushed down, out of the sweet spot. SEO is becoming ridiculously hard to max out because there are no longer 5 or 10 slots that matter. There are just a couple.

I think small businesses – 1-10 employees are being hammered. It’s becoming more difficult to break into any online business that relies on the search engines. Companies must have budgets to hire people to do videos, images, and now tweets.

I think Google is favoring big business. Big business rules online, just as it did offline. It can’t be any other way, right?

If the Twitter results are really prominent displayed in Google results, whole businesses will develop to take advantage of this chance to get high placement in Google’s SERP’s. Heck, I might jump into that space if the getting looks good.

Will they rank the Twitter data higher than YouTube videos? Higher than image results?

Interesting to see what comes of this – the game is always changing!