About two weeks ago I joined the small group of users who are currently trialing the new Google look. I was vaguely aware of a shift in the left margin, which I decided at first as a glitch in my browser. Then my search results jumped to life when I came across a box of automatically scrolling tweets
Deep thought: will timeliness trump PageRank-ness?
I’m not sure how the Google mardarins decide when a keyword deserves a Twitter results box. It may be as simple as a threshold being met for tweet volume within a time window. There are other search engines, especially in the blog realm, where timeliness does receive weight (along with, of course, authority) in determining ranks. But this is the first I’ve seen Google take this into account in their ranking calculations.
With more valuable content being created by piece-meal content workers (twitter-ers, bloggers, and on-line forum commenters), Google has no choice but to start looking a tad more like Tweetdeck and other real-time search tools.
In my view, Google hasn’t added much extra complexity in organizing real-time content. (And they did pass the fork test.) Their solution was to put a chevron menu on the left side that allows users to organize search results according to when the content was updated.
So… when I clicked on “latest”, a preponderance of recent blog posts and tweets showed up. If this new interface does become the official front-end, I won’t give up my Tweetdeck. However, I’ll be a little less likely to leave Google-land for twitter-ville.