In late May, Larry Page stated at a conference that he believes real-time search is a necessity. He also referenced Twitter. Now, Marissa Mayer’s performed a sort of follow-up on both counts, and this might indicate an official corporate interest.
An on-the-fly response to a question from Loic Le Meur is one thing, after all. Rehearsed, repeated speeches constitute quite another – think products in development or acquisition talks. So let’s move on to Mayer’s statement to let you judge for yourself.
Mayer told Charles Arthur, “We think the real-time search is incredibly important and the real-time data that’s coming online can be super-useful in terms of us finding out something like, you know, is this conference today any good? Is it warmer in San Francisco than it is in Silicon Valley? You can actually look at tweets and see those sorts of patterns, so there’s a lot of useful information about real time and your actions that we think ultimately will reinvent search.”
She later added, “I can’t comment on any discussions that we may or may not be having between the companies. I can say that we think that real-time search is very interesting.”
There you have it, then. Although there may be one more thing worth noting: since Bing entered the real-time search arena last week, this increases the pressure for Google to act.
