Loading ...Earlier this week, Google announced that it has begun integrating real-time search into its regular search results. Incidentally, Rae Hoffman, CEO and Co-Founder of Outspoken Media, began playing with the new feature and discovered some alarming results.
The first concern Hoffman noticed is a spam issue. Upon tweeting about Viagra, she found that her results were showing up in Google’s results. She was even able to drop links into her tweets that people could access directly from Google.
Secondly, Hoffman uncovered reputation management issues with Google’s new integration. An unhappy employee or competitor could easily damage a company’s reputation. During a session at SES Chicago, Dave Naylor even mentioned that he might have to clean up his Twitter stream over fear of losing business.
Thirdly and probably the most serious of the issues Hoffman revealed is the safety concerns for children online. Through a series of tests including the highest level of safe search, Hoffman was able to reach out to kids who searched for queries such as Sesame Street and Miley Cyrus. Unfortunately, sexual predators could easily do the same. Scary, huh?
There were actually even more discoveries Hoffman was able to uncover that she did not disclose.
Many people believe Google rushed its real-time integration to respond to the recent real-time efforts Bing has made. Hoffman predicts that Google will either have bad results for a while as they fix their problems, or admit they made a mistake and deal with a reputation management problem.
What is your response to Google’s real-time integration?
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I did a blog post about this showing my own examples of spamming twitter. I don’t think it has anything to do with approved twitter accounts. http://www.seosean.com/blog/google-and-twitter-spam-disaster
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Wow,… Who is this?
one thing that annoys us is that the general public does not have a clue on this. as we stated before, with all these changes we think that it really hurts the average user because with all the confusion of adding extra features to search results, I’m guessing that sooner or later people will want to go back to the basics.
we are moving too fast without direction and just to get the upper hand for a little bit of time is a waisted effort for long term users.
Make sence?
Now that’s what i call slapping google back! As with any new software intergration there is going to be a few tweaks to work out.I think you were right to test it with a “out the box” perspective.I feel there zeal to rush this left themselves a little vunerable to spam.But your test should also be made on the other search engines in all fairness.
Notice too that Rae’s article ranks #2 for Google Spam & 1st page for Spam alone!
,Michael Martin
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I saw these earlier – and they were almost a little freaky. but now i can’t get it to show up..
This is an excellent overview of some of the many issues plaguing Google’s real-time search implementation. Google’s version was clearly rushed out and this move might well now backfire quite badly. Please take a look at the real-time, semantic, social search engine TipTop at http://FeelTipTop.com to see how some smarter technology can solve some of these issues quite well.
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Great video coverage. Think we might have to be very careful of our online reputation and start our PR efforts for our company names on a daily basis to keep this issue at bay.
Hope Google can do something about this soon.
Regards,
Sam Soh
If you are looking for a product o service some tweet results might come up from an unknown twitterer?
Why? Who cares what some twitterer has got to say regarding what I am looking for?
I was just monitoring new on the iPad and the real-time results was all twitter spam. Pretty worthless in my mind.
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I saw these earlier – and they were almost a little freaky. but now i can’t get it to show up..
Thirdly and probably the most serious of the issues Hoffman revealed is the safety concerns for children online. Through a series of tests including the highest level of safe search, Hoffman was able to reach out to kids who searched for queries such as Sesame Street and Miley Cyrus. Unfortunately, sexual predators could easily do the same. Scary, huh?