We are really on the same page – Real-time search is a fantastic powerful thing but keep it out of my SERPs. Same thing with social. It can be really useful but I’m only interested in that kind of thing a relatively small percentage of the time – I had a client call up asking me recently if they needed to get on Twitter so that they could show up in real-time results in the SERPs. What’s interesting is that it is really a question about how things are going to evolve – which is always difficult to address but probably represents what’s really special about a great consultant. My intuition is that real time results are being tested in the SERPs and will be mostly removed except for certain types of trending topics.

Would you care to elaborate? What do you find useful about it?

I find real time search very useful personally, although I don’t particularly like the idea of them being in the search engine results pages. I’m pretty content to do a separate search in a different platform when I want to know what people are talking about in any given moment.