The race for real-time search is gathering pace and Google for quite some time have been very worried about the dominance that Twitter have been making in this space.
Google introduced in May a change to their "Search Options" and amongst others one of the things they offer was the ability to search within 24 hours. This is a nice addition but far off real-time search.
However, there is a hack around this that can let you search in the past minute or event the past second.
The trick is to know how to understand what constitutes the parameters in a URL. A topic very rarely discussed in recruitment circles. Most search engines use different priority parameters as well as sometimes different operators and modifiers to search their index. The tilde search being a good example in Google.
However, something I've learnt about this week is the Query Date Range or qdr:d parameter.
All you have to do to search for the query in the past minute is to change the parameter to qdr:n, and for the past second to qdr:s.
For example, this weekend I was searching for real-time Lisbon treaty information.
http://www.google.ie/search?q=%22lisbon%20treaty%22&hl=en&sa=G&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:d
Take the end of the URL and the qdr:d parameter and change the d for a n and you then get the engine to display in minutes not just within 24 hours.
http://www.google.ie/search?q=%22lisbon%20treaty%22&hl=en&sa=G&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:n
Big difference in what the index returned and much closer to real time.
If used properly could be used to help study the market you operate in with all the breaking news indexed by Google's search engine as soon as possible. Helped me greatly this weekendto study what was being posted about the Lisbon treaty and proved much quicker than Google news and other news aggregators for certain themes I was searching.
Real-time search will be discussed at the Future of Recruitment conference this week when Bill Fischer gives his presentation on Twitter Jobs Search.
Hope to see you there. Happy Hunting!
PS - To hear more about tips and industry news you can follow my #irishrecruiters hashtag on Twitter
