Google Real-Time Search Invades the Intranet

December 11, 2009

Google’s freshly launched real-time search is the big news of the week. And as it turns out, real-time search is not just limited to public searches on Google.com, but is also available to Google Search Appliance users.

Now, if your intranet or Web site search is powered by Google’s enterprise universal search appliance, you too can take in real-time tweets related to search queries.

There are two key differences to point out between Google.com and Google Search Appliance. Google Search Appliance users will notice that real-time search is limited to just Twitter feeds for the time being (you’ll have to forgo Facebook Page updates and the like for now), and tweets are displayed in a separate search box. So while Google.com’s implementation shows tweets appearing inline with other results, intranet search will highlight them separately.

If you’re a GSA user, you’ll want to have an administrator follow these instructions to turn on real-time tweets for search. You’ll also have the option to enable the functionality for all users, individual users, or allow for users to self-select their real-time preferences.

real-time tweets

The Google Enterprise Blog writes:

“Social information is important for businesses: employees searching for information needed to do their jobs benefit from real-time news too. They might be developing a new breakfast cereal, or designing a marketing plan for a clothing line, or writing strategy report for a political campaign. In all of these cases, understanding what is being said just as Twitter users are saying it can be invaluable.”

The addition of Twitter updates to enterprise search seems like an natural extension of Google’s new-found focus on real-time. If you’re a GSA user, share your thoughts on the development below.

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