Is real time search a moneymaker?
Microsoft and Google have been falling all over themselves trying to one-up each other in searching Twitter and Facebook. Aside from the pleasure of elbowing a rival, is there any money to be made? Monday’s New York Times business section looked at this question. The gist is that no one is sure. Neither Microsoft nor Google claim that advertising money is going to roll in. They just want to attract users to their search facility:
Sean Suchter, a general manager for search technology at Microsoft, said that he expected real-time search would eventually become lucrative. But he added that for now, “The goal is definitely to drive user value.”
SIMILARLY, Google said that real-time search is valuable, though not necessarily because the queries will generate as much cash as regular searches.
“We don’t know enough about what kinds of queries people would issue against real-time data to know how monetizable it is,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience.
Google wants the Twitter data primarily because its mission is to be comprehensive: Google wants to organize all of the world’s information, including the Web’s fleeting real-time conversations.
“We do know that comprehensiveness has a commercial benefit for our business,” she said. In other words, comprehensiveness keeps people searching on Google.
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