Searching for Breaking News

The other day, sadly, Manute Bol passed away. When I first heard this rumored, I consulted my trusty breaking news source: search.twitter.com. I was quickly able to confirm the rumor with information from multiple verified sources, saw people’s various responses, and chimed in with my own memory of the former NBA player and humanitarian, the “Block the Bol” music video (well worth it for some 80′s nostalgia if you need a laugh and have 4 minutes).

This Fall, there was a lot of hype around the fact that Twitter was selling the big search engines access to its firehose of data. The implication was that real-time data would massively improve the relevance of search results. There’s obviously a lot of potential here but it seems to me that neither Google or Bing has really nailed it yet. And perhaps another player will emerge.

Take for example something something that happened yesterday in sports. No, nothing to do with soccer or tennis! Jason Giambi of the Colorado Rockies hit a dramatic walk-off homerun off his former nemesis Jonathan Papelbon to win a (baseball) game against the Boston Red Sox. Suppose I want to see a video of that homerun today–where should I look? I went to search.twitter and found a link to it in about 6 seconds on mlb.com.

How about traditional search? A Bing search provided some interesting content, including Giambi’s box score line from last night’s game, but nothing that screams of influence from real-time feedback:

Yes, at the bottom there is a “News” feed which contains the link to an article describing yesterday’s game. You can also click on recent tweets, which showed me 3 relevant Tweets. 2 were identical tweets by different users sharing an article from MSNBC. No trace of the video.

Next I tried Bing’s video search. There’s a lot of video content on the web related to Jason Giambi. But I didn’t find last night’s video in their pages of results. They certainly aren’t customizing the user experience based on a recent event.

My experience on Google was slightly better. I did find the video footage of the homerun as posted on espn.com by navigating to Google News and sorting by latest. And that’s not unreasonable, but I think they are only scratching the surface of capitalizing on breaking news and delivering the most relevant search results. I do think there is huge potential in integration of crowd-sourced information into traditional online search. Here’s a well written article by Jolie O’Dell last Fall that considered some of the possibilities and implications.

Obviously, it’s a monumental task to tailor the user search experience based upon real-time information. For my money, to date nothing trumps good old Twitter search.