14 DAY TRIAL // Google co-founder Larry Page and Chief Executive Eric Schmidt have admitted that the company hasn't been able to keep up with Twitter when it comes to real-time news and information. The two representatives told this and more to the audience at Google's Zeitgeist conference in London, as reported by the Guardian.
"People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it," Page said. "I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis."
Twitter has become the place for tracking real-time events as they unfold because of its immediate approach to blogging. It is all about speed and this is obvious even from its maximum of 140 characters. News spreads like wildfire as an initial tweet is being picked up and sent forth by more and more users.
Google, by comparison, seems rather slow as it can take hours or more for a piece of information to reach its search results. Page admitted that it was an issue he had asked Google's research teams to focus on. "Now I think they understand that," he said. "I think we will do a better job of some of those things." But he also added that the immediacy of the results came at the expense of accuracy, the latter being what the search giant had always stressed more.
Google had a competing product against Twitter in Jaiku, the micro-blogging service it acquired in 2007, but which never really took off; not only that, but the company announced earlier this year that development on Jaiku had stopped. This, coupled with the popularity of Twitter, sparked some rumors that the giant, with a record of acquiring up-and-coming social networks, would buy Twitter altogether. This was denied however by Google's CEO. "There is a presumption that somehow you cannot have multiple solutions that co-exist," Schmidt said. "We do not have to buy everybody to work with them, the whole principle of the Web is people can talk to each other," hinting at future partnerships with Twitter.