Google's "real-time" search -- is it useful?

Just because you can add a new feature, it does not mean that you should.  Google's first attempt at real-time search is forcing a "feature" into a system that previously worked for its users. The result is a compromised user experience of a product that previously worked well.  Anyone else think this smacks of feature-creep at the expense of usability?

For another very tangible example, we need only take a look at Microsoft Word. When is the last time you used mail merge by the way?

To the point, it seems that since Google believes that they have perfected Web search (which I'm not so sure about), they will go ahead and slap the "real-time" results into the interface to deliver an even "richer" experience. Check out the Google search results page of my recent search for the country's latest uncelebrity, Tiger Woods.

In fairness to Google, they’re most likely clumping real-time search results together visually like this due to limitations of their algorithms.  In spite of those very real technical challenges, the fact remains that most users would find a 15,000 word Wikipedia entry far more relevant than a 140-character Tweet any day of the week. As for me, I'm not sure that I would know how to make the comparison between the two "documents" from a relevancy perspective; moreover, even come up with a good heuristic for it. 

Anyway, the end result as you can see from the screen capture above is that the Twitter results are ranked above the more canonical results like Wikipedia. Whether real-time search results come before or after the first few organic search rankings seems to be under testing since it changed as I ran the query a few times. Either way, it feels like Google is mixing apples and oranges, or maybe Styrofoam peanuts and bowling balls, while sometimes giving the peanuts preferential treatment.

The problem is that micro-blogging (read Twitter) content is virtually worthless without the context of knowing both the author and "Twittersphere" at-large at the time of the Tweet. Right now, I don’t believe that Google is taking much of this wider context into consideration, or even if they can. When they start to do so, real-time search could become much more useful within the Google search results page design.  As it stands, it sure seems like a block of keyword matching Tweets slapped into the middle of what I know to be relevant results -- and it’s a distraction.

As President and CTO, Tim sets the vision and overall direction for new product development and partner strategy at Siteworx, an interactive agency.