The Real Time Web

Zack Owens
Friday, January 29, 2010


With the emergence of social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter, data stored on the Internet is now increasing exponentially. Along with the simple data users see on the page, website operators now have a new data for users of websites (which also grows exponentially). Google will store all your searches for your entire lifetime. Twitter will store every 140 character message you send to your followers for your lifetime. Facebook will track every person's picture, profile, or message you read. While this can be alarming to some, this trend is generally helpful to all.

Search engines, this year especially, will begin to accommodate the shift from static content that changes rarely to bringing relevant search results that can be updated in minutes. It is the job of website owners and developers to adapt to this trend to increase their marketability. The age old "don't touch your content, it'll rank better on Google" is starting to diminish. Most SEO companies are shaking in their boots. The typical SEO will write a website's text once and not allow the client to change the text because, in their eyes, it's "perfectly optimized" and should not be touched for better search results. That's not going to go so well anymore... and Google has been known to shake things up. Google and other search engines refine their search tracking algorithms quite frequently to give everyone the chance to rank high in search results for relevant keywords. They attempt to prevent any search spam or irrelevant results.

This year Google is going to make a big shift and adapt to the real time web. In this last year especially, services like Twitter and news websites such as CNN produce more original content in one day than the first few years of the Internet combined. We're seeing the democratization of publishing and search engines have been slow to adapt until now. The Real Time Web is a search-focused web that will provide up-to-date results that don't give priority, but rather relevancy.

What this shakeup means for website owners and developers such as eagleenvision.net is that we must produce content that will be beneficial to the user. While this blog post is slightly bias toward the search engine, our company keeps the users of the web as our top priority. This is the whole goal of search, to attract the users that will be interested in your product, service, or organization. To satisfy the new application of the real time web, it is more important than ever to refine text and produce new content for a website. This may include a blog, real time data, Twitter feed, or any updates for your users. This will show a search algorithm that you're focused on your website users and will also deliver new keyword placement and ranking opportunities, something you should never pass up.