So Google Loses Out When It Comes to Realtime Global Events?

There’s been quite a few posts around lately commenting on how Google is missing out on real time web traffic (e.g. Sorry Google, You Missed the Real-Time Web! and Why Google Must Worry About Twitter). Stats just out showing search’n’twitter activity during Obama’s inauguration yesterday show how…

First up, Google’s traffic slump:

And then Twitter’s traffic peak:

And how did I find out? Via this:

which led to the posts containing the traffic graphs shown above.

And I got a link to that tweet from Adam Gurri who was responding to a tweet I’d made about a the Google traffic post… (which in turn was a follow-up to a tweet I posted about whether anyone “turned on a TV to watch the US presidential inauguration yesterday?”)

Adam also pointed me to this nice observation:

And here’s how a few people responded to how they watched the event (I watched on the web):

So, web for video, broadcast radio for audio and Twitter for text. And TV for, err… time for change, maybe?

Author: Tony Hirst

I'm a Senior Lecturer at The Open University, with an interest in #opendata policy and practice, as well as general web tinkering...

4 thoughts on “So Google Loses Out When It Comes to Realtime Global Events?”

  1. Very intersting. It’s fascinating to see how Twitter is evolving. I’m now using it as: a news source; a communication tool; to ask and answer questions; to find out about events; to meet people (as I did with someone unplanned on a train to Leeds); to be entertained; and to unload random thoughts.
    Google is a directory – a rather brilliant one, but rather flat in comparison to twitter.

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  3. So you’re showing that search traffic dropped during the inauguration? That’s hardly surprising and i can’t imagine Google is in any way worried.

    Google search is about getting hold of cached information, it’s not a realtime offering so why would they be bothering to compete with Twitter in terms of search requests?

    Google’s realtime offering is probably Google News more than anything, comparing that with Twitter might be interesting.

    You’re comparing two different technologies with two different purposes. Twitter is a publishing tool, it contains content. Google Search doesn’t have content, it sends users to other people’s content.

  4. “You’re comparing two different technologies with two different purposes. Twitter is a publishing tool, it contains content. Google Search doesn’t have content, it sends users to other people’s content.”

    Yes and no – they are both information discovery engines/query answering machines… If i want to know something, I quite often use my Twitter network as well as (or even rather than) Google…

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