Real-Time search issues of the unreal world

Tue Dec 29 20:17:16 IST 2009, by Abhishek Mehta

Real-time search is just like social networking fever either you are immune to it or suffering from "Social Networking Flu". Come what may, you cannot ignore it anymore as Google and Bing both have joined Real-time search bandwagon. Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, FriendFeed etc. are the Cannons and Web searcher like us have become the fodder for them. For those who are new to Real-time search concept, In brief:

Real-time search: Searching "for and about" the information as soon as it is being produced. Blogs, News, Tweets, Social networking and Collaboration websites are the real time sources. Web searchers can search for information based on their keywords, as it is getting published, live. Traditionally, it takes days-to-weeks for a webpage to appear in search engines but that time lapse has been reduced to seconds, of course with limited life cycle.

Highlighted image shows the Google Real-time search. It is a handy feature; Caveat world is not as real as we are. Creators of the Real-time search should remember that success of anything does not depend on its need, but on its usefulness, reliability and quality. With Real-time search, almost everything is under question.

Spammer's Den / Hacker's Paradise/ Phishing Villa

Recent studies showed that 40% of tweets are spams, self-promotion or retweets and other one concluded, more than half of the social networkers have admitted about lying on their profiles. With such false seed of information predicting the fruit is no difficult, no pundit needed. Internet back marketers (More..) who have gained grounds in social networking arena will not miss out on this opportunity. Earlier, spam use to take time, money and effort to get into search engines results but now it won't even have to fight for web page ranking. All they have to do is keep on tweeting about their spam, malware and Phishing links on the tweeter or social networking profiles and search engines will take this spam to millions of people world wide, immediately.

With workflow like that of Bing where it highlights the top tweeted items on its homepage, will save lots of advertising money for spammers once they have paid their Twitter Black marketer to make it to the top tweeted items. Phishing is set to gain in big way as results shown in Google are considered to be authentic by a regular netizens, it will not be difficult to redirect incoming requests to unwanted websites.

Authentic source of unauthentic information

Tim Berners-Lee just didn't get it; Internet does not want to be authentic and safe place; what is this genius talking about!

Search Engines like Google drives 70% of the Internet search market; average netizens considers it as authentic source for information retrieval. Certainly, these netizens are not correct but with Real-time search they are going to become even more wrong. Links embedded in tweets, social networking and microblogging updates are outside the scope of Google/Bing to test because of time constraint and sheer quantity of data. For example: I searched for Real-time results of the movie "Avatar", and was flooded with results from twitter. Lots of good results but another lot was of spam-infested hyperlinks taking me to all kinds of websites. Google says that they have team reviewing the results, which show up from twitter, but my results proves that they are not doing good job, as of now. This time spammers did not spammed me from email or I clicking at the wrong place, he simply wrote in his tweet: "Avatar a Good movie, here is my review http://camoflaugeURL", this hyper link was shortened using valid third party service and redirected me to objectionable website. Spammers do not have to use SEO or hack innocent website anymore, all they are saying is: Tweet Baby, Tweet!

No Policy is bigger than that of Search Engine's

Companies, Collages, Schools and various other institutions have banned social networking websites for various reasons. Some are concerned about employee productivity, information sensitivity, child security and many such reasons. Search engines are allowed everywhere as they are supposed to increase the productivity. Real-time search is insensitive to company's policies and open mockery of the efforts to keep online behavior in check. Real-time search has given back door entry to social networking in you office in asynchronous mode. Yes! I cannot send the Tweets but I can easily read a tagged tweets from my group/community/friends, via Google.

Brand Image Nightmare

Real-time search bind together the abilities of social networking, micro blogging, brand promotion and individual identity. With this search entering the mainstream Internet, frustrated ex-employees can convert these blessings in disguise in disguised curse; spammers, competitors or just greedy individual can hold you for ransom by maligning your name, products and organizations. Techniques of negative tweeting, name jacking, derogatory registration as the usernames on these social-networking and microblogging sites can harm your brand image (More..).

Imagine on the launch day of your product, Internet is filled with negative reviews; all getting produced live by thousands of Tweeter bots. Twitter bots run by rough Internet communities and other individual, who run their show by buying thousands of Twitter followers (More..) can fill up Google with negative publicity. Certainly that is not where you want to land up, as Google is the likely place where future customers will look for the review. Keep your eyes open to this kind of negative promotions else your brand will be a sitting duck.

Search Engines have to address these concerns of netizens before their Real-time search features are adopted and used by Internet fraternity. Otherwise we all have seen rise and fall of thousands of products, which are more of a hassle than fun.

Posted at 08:17PM Dec 29, 2009 by ABhi in Trends  |  Comments[0]