14 DAY TRIAL // Real-time search is the hot topic right now, especially since Google has rolled out a full-blown service inside the main search engine. Bing has been doing it for more than a month now, Yahoo has just revealed it will integrate tweets as well, and now real-time search is moving to enterprise search as Google has announced that it will serve results from Twitter with its Google Search Appliance for businesses.
“Real-time information is becoming an increasingly important part of searching online – both for business and consumer search users. Yesterday we announced the launch of real-time results on Google.com, and today we're announcing that the Google Search Appliance (GSA) can show users tweets from Twitter next to their internal Search Appliance results,” Cyrus Mistry, product manager, Google Enterprise Search wrote.
The announcement is clearly related to the real-time features Google introduced to the search engine, but there are some notable differences between the two products. Whereas real-time results are thrown in among the regular ones, on the main search engine, they are relegated to a section on the right of the page on searches with the GSA.
This separation is important and it makes sense that Google chose this path. When doing a regular search online, you expect to get the most relevant results, regardless of their origin. With the GSA though, you expect to get results from internal company sources, it is an intranet search service after all, so the main search results come exclusively from inside the company.
But web results can sometimes be important even when using the internal search engine, so Google also serves results from the main search engine on the right hand site of the interface, where the ads would normally sit. Now, admins can configure the GSA to show results from Twitter, and only Twitter not any other real-time source, above the normal web results.
“Customers have told us that placing web results next to intranet ones often allows employees to think differently about a particular topic and approach it in new ways. By integrating enterprise search with more of the information that exists in the cloud, like tweets, employees can more easily leverage the wisdom of the crowd,” he added.