Google (GOOG) And Yahoo (YHOO) To Face Challenges And Opportunities In Real-Time Web

Broadpoint.Amtech's Internet analyst, Benjamin Schachter, commented after conducting a conference call with Kimbal Musk, CEO of OneRiot, discussing the real-time web.

Broadpoint.Amtech believes the concept of real-time search and the potential threat/opportunity to established search companies like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) is somewhat misunderstood by investors, and below it presents some of its findings.

"Static web" vs. "Real-Time web": The promise of real-time search is that it provides "fresher" search results than are theoretically provided by larger "static web" search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT). However, Google and Microsoft's Bing are extremely quick at picking up new news so I wouldn't exactly call them "static".

There is a lot of noise around real-time results, because so far there is not one great way to rank the results. It is difficult to organize all of the data into a relevant set of results for a user seeking real-time information. Google uses its "PageRank" methodology to rank its search results. However, that doesn't work for real-time search as the links will not have sufficient time to build historical and authoritative links.

Musk admitted that as long as the internal "political will" exists at Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to go after real-time search, then they could probably launch more significant "real-time" search services within 12 months.

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