1) Semantic Search – Search Engines being able to interpret what a user is actually looking for and then serving the relevant results (clearly seen with the ‘wrong Michael Jackson’)

2)Real Time information – the challenge of being able to serve instant results, but not results that include spam or unreliable info. Neither Jeff Goldblum nor Britney Spears died, though real time info suggested that they did, because in a world where you have to be first these stories were spreading faster than anyone could verify them.

I agree with the points about monitoring the internet and needing to know what people are saying about you brand – and responding where necessary, however getting (and acting on) the wrong information is worse than doing nothing at all. Real time is a challenge for any information filter – especially around seperating out truth.

The problem the “traditional” search engines have is that they spider the web to build in-house indexes to search (faster results), count the links to the webpages they index, and keep long memories – so a post from 1997 with lots of links will count higher than one from yesterday with no links.

Realtime search on the other hand will see the rapid rise of yesterday’s story. But the longer the lens back, the more long term the Realtime engine’s view as well – for example “top trending” story of the day is different to that of the week, month, etc.

The downside of realtime search is that it is massively resource intensive so unless very focussed takes a long time.