Real Time is a Real Drag

This is only my second post, but I'm going out on a limb anyway.

I hate Google's new real-time results.

There, I said it. I feel so much better now. I know my opinion probably puts me in the know-nothing category for a lot of social media aficionados, but I don't care. It was already hard enough to find what you wanted in search results -- now you have to wade through Twitter posts too? How is this improving my search experience?

Take my search today for LL Zamenhof. I was curious about today's Google doodle, so I checked it out, and it happens to be the birthday of Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, an international language.

I clicked on a few links to get more information, just as I usually would when doing a search. But then, approximately 5 results down, the Twitter posts started flooding in. A lot of them just had #google and a link to Google's explanation of their doodle (guess I'm not the only one who found the father of Esperanto to be a somewhat obscure reference). The posts that didn't have the hashtag didn't really have anything important to add, but they just keep coming in. And I kept looking at them, thinking "I'm going to get some enlightening piece of information from some random Twitter post." Finally, I realized I would probably be staring a long time and moved on to something more productive.

I'm trying to think of instances where these immediate results would be useful, and I guess if there were an emergency of some kind like an earthquake or a school shooting the up-to-the-minute results would be welcome. But then again, since you can never be sure of the source of the information or its accuracy, maybe these posts would just add to the confusion.

In one of his posts last week, big-time blogger Pete Cashmore made a huge deal about this latest development in real-time web searches. So again, I know I must be the odd woman out in not thinking this is the greatest thing since the iPhone. But until I find myself in the midst of a panic situation where I welcome even the smallest slice of info from a random stranger, I'm greeting this new Google functionality with lukewarm enthusiasm.