Google and MySpace have forged a new deal, primarily for real-time search results. The search engine company has confirmed the rumors that the two companies have been in talks regarding an SEO deal, and Google will begin including MySpace content in its real time search results.
Despite issues between Google and MySpace in the past, MySpace may be able to provide some value still to the large search engine company. As Google looks to build out its real time search options, MySpace is being leveraged towards providing relevant and immediate search results for added context.
Real time search has largely turned to social media content for the past few months, highlighting social media’s ability to add another layer of context to th data we receive in the form of search results. For a given query, we can gain a certain level of instant gratification based on content published from user-generated sites such as MySpace, moving away from the validation process required by more trusted news sources. As the content from social media outlets is also rather plentiful, the ability to pull from all that time/date-stamped data has been a low-hanging fruit tempting search engines for quite some time.
Twitter helped to bring real time search into the mainstream, with Facebook and MySpace quickly following suit. For Google, the deal with MySpace means that the search engine can expand its real time search offerings, potentially improving the context behind such social searches. This goes along with many of Google’s other initiatives on the social front, including socially-oriented search results that now appear for signed in users. Along with Google Buzz and a few other social efforts, Google is clearly moving towards a more inclusive format regarding its real time search.
Whatever Google ends up doing with MySpace content for its real time search products, we’re likely to see something more useful than what other search engines have provided. Jumping head first into real time search has been something other search engines have done in the past year or so, while Google already has a founation upon which real time, socially-generated search results can be provided. Nevertheless, Google has had a harder time incorporating real time search into its established methods, especially when it comes to forging certain deals in order to access social media outlets.
Facebook has been another large database with a great deal of potential towards the real time search efforts of several search engines. For the time being, Microsoft has a better standing with Facebook regarding the use of its increasingly public interface towards real time and social search content. Google’s deal with MySpace may help overcome some of the shortcomings of its deal with Facbook, especially as it looks to stay competitive with the likes of Microsoft Bing.
For MySpace, the social network has been losing ground to Facebook for quite some time now. Having become a trend passed, MySpace has spent the past year or so rebuilding its company and its network. Returning to the basics of user-generated content and social networking, MySpace is also looking for a way to get back into the game. A real time search deal with Google may be a good outlet for MySpace, given its intentions towards its own marketing efforts.