The IEEE Spectrum piece Real-Time Search Stumbles Out of the Gate discusses the recent integration of real-time search features, such as Twitter and other microblog entries, into major search engines. Professor Filippo Menczer, CNetS associate director, comments in the article on the challenges posed by real-time search. Here is an excerpt of the interview:

IU’s Menczer suggests that with all this user-generated content, the environment is more complex than the one Google’s PageRank algorithm had to deal with. While search used to be about relationships between pages, he explains, now it’s about relationships between ”people, tags, Web pages, ratings, votes, and direct social links….It may not be that page A points to page B but rather that user John follows Mary and replies to the tweet of Jane and retweets it.” That makes it ”a more complicated ecosystem,” he says, ”but a very rich one,” and search engines will need ”more sophisticated ways to extract data from these relationships” [...]