With the popularity of Twitter over the last year, much attention has been placed on real-time search and how it might affect search engine optimization (SEO) and according to Google’s Marissa Mayer, it’s something the company believes is "incredibly important."
In an interview with the UK’s Guardian newspaper, Mayer called real-time search "very interesting" and said the company believes the interaction that is going on among people on Twitter and other social networking sites will have a role in the future of search.
While Google still holds onto the lion share of the search engine market, Mayer indicated that the increasing amount of competition in the search engine world is actually good for the industry.
"I think that there’s a lot of new competition entering the search space of late and we’re very excited about it because we think that this kind of increased focus and increased competition really does yield better results for end users," she told the Guardian.
Google’s most recent competition in the world of search is from Microsoft’s Bing, but despite a multi-million dollar ad campaign behind the new engine, a new report shows that Google’s results are still more relevant.
A recent study from Citigroup tested Google and Bing in 200 common search queries and found that Google’s results were relevant 71 percent of the time compared to 49 percent for Bing. Yahoo, which currently is the number two search engine in the market, had relevant results 30 percent of the time.
