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How Google got left behind

Monday, November 02, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Suppose there's a topic you're interested in and you want to stay current on it. What tool would you use to do that? 

That's at least part of the purpose of the whole push to "realtime" stuff. I've been writing about it since 1997, I called it Just-In-Time Search. Similar ideas, but not exactly. 

When you search for friends you always get the same old pictures, because the search engine reports them in order of relevance. Perhaps there are newer pictures, but they're nowhere near the top, and it might not even consider them relevant enough to index.  

We need a search engine whose primary axis is currency, that values news and images based on their newness, not by how many others are pointing to it. Google has News Alerts, but that's it. Their news system is geared toward big stories. I'm interested in the small stuff their search engine covers. There's news there too. 

Update: A commenter says that Google does have time-based search. I'll check it out.