by Stephen Shankland
At 10:09:36 a.m. PST, a modest but noticeable magnitude 4.1 earthquake
rattled the San Francisco Bay Area. Six minutes later, Google's
real-time search system had spotted the activity and spiced up its
search results.
Earthquakes and plane crashes are among the quintessential examples of
a sudden event that produces lots of online chatter, so as soon as I
heard about the quake I thought it would be a good time to see how
Google handled it.
A Twitter search for "earthquake" was immediately inundated with
tweets about the event as the Bay Area's digitally active population
uttered a collective exclamation about the event. I immediately
searched Google for "earthquake" afterward and refreshed the search
until I spotted the in-page scrolling list of real-time results.
The lag was 6 minutes, which struck me as fairly impressive for such a
mammoth operation as Google search. However, I'd venture to suggest it
wasn't the most demanding test: the earthquake event probably was
conveniently located in a digitally hip area; the single word
"earthquake" was virtually universally used; and it's the kind of
widespread event everybody cares about to some degree, as opposed to
something like expiring celebrities, sports results, or gadget
launches that only subsets of the population notice.
Google boasted that its real-time search produces not only
fast-response results but also high relevance. However, I have to say
that many of the items that scrolled past--Whooo, earthquake in
Northern Cali!"--struck me as not much of an improvement over
Twitter's time-based results. Google also salted up the results with
other material--a quick Palo Alto Online story on the quake as well as
an earthquake preparation story in the Uxbridge Gazette in the U.K.
Google search shows earthquake-related search results after a quake
near San Francisco.
Google search shows earthquake-related search results after a quake
near San Francisco.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
You can argue, though, that just seeing the scrolling real-time result
is helpful to tip people off that something is going on right now they
might want to be aware of.
A couple other data points struck me here, too.
First, though the first real-time scrolling results showed about 6
minutes afterward, it took another 6 minutes before it showed in my
browser when I logged out of my Google account. I'm in Detroit right
now, which struck me as the likely explanation; my Google account
locates me in San Francisco. With Google now personalizing every
search result, Google account or no, different people see different
results.
Second, it took until 24 minutes afterward for me to see a link to the
United States Geological Survey's online result in the search results,
though I confess I wasn't paying close attention to when it first
arrived. It wasn't there at the outset, though.
I'll avoid passing final judgment on Google's real-time search based
on one person's look at one event, but the data points were still
intriguing to me.