Last week Microsoft triggered something of an imbroglio by forging formal agreements with both Twitter and Facebook whereby their content will be indexed for inclusion in Bing search results. Google quickly responded with announcements of its own: asserting that it, too, will be including Twitter “tweets” in search results, and that it has concrete plans to roll-out “Google Social Search”, one of the initiatives that has been underway in Google Labs for a while.

But Google’s approach to social search is quite different. As a pre-requisite, users must have a Google ID, populate a fairly extensive user profile and build (or import) a list of Contacts. Search results will consist only of content created by the people included in that Contact List. Thus, it is a searchable version of FriendFeed. Greg Sterling did this post on Screenwerk with a video from Google, gives a very good demonstration of the new service, which was officially introduced in “Google Labs” today.

By covering the story as a “Google versus Microsoft” catfight for real time data, the general media has missed an important message to end users. “Take Control of Your Metadata”. This can be the very development that leads Web users to discover their explicit power to shape their search results – based on both actively and passively provided indicators or interest, presence, friendships and trust. Whereas the blog posts and Tweets of Alpha Dog narcissists had been raw material for a Real Time Web, the new search model can constrain search to topics of interest from people you know and perhaps trust (in as much as they are in your contact list).

More importantly, when “status indicators” and “user profiles” become the grist of the online search mill, I believe it will give the general public more incentive to manage the metadata they are creating. It’s just a matter of hygiene. We’re getting previews of the nature of new profiles when services like Aardvark.com members to assign tags themselves with their areas or interest or expertise. That may always be a stretch. Yet it is clear that all of the real-time search engines are excellent at the sort of pattern recognition and detection that can pretty accurately assign tag clouds to your areas of interest and expertise for you.

As with most recombinant initiatives, a good bit of assembly is required. I’m just hoping that end-users become their best advocates as the ecosystem for real-time search takes shape.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Microsoft, Recombinant Telephony, Twitter, Google, Facebook, real time Web