SEO Tip #51: Will We See Realtime Results from Site: Queries?

Matt Cutts: I think Google is getting better and better at returning fresher results. In fact 2009 was a real area where we concentrated on fresh and real-time results. So whether it will work with “site:” I don’t know if that will happen, but that’s not something that most regular users type.

Something that regular users do care about is how fresh their regular search results are. So if you want to see how fast Google can be you can do a search like Obama for example and then on the left-hand side in this new search UI that we have you can click on latest to see the latest results we have indexed.

For example as I’m recording this right now it’s cbc.ca, “Obama to create oil spill commission” and that was one minute ago. So that’s something that less than a minute ago or less than a minute ago we crawled, we could index it and we could serve it in about a minute. I have seen things as little as 13 or 14 seconds old.

So Google has done a ton of work to try to make it so that as soon as we crawl the page it can flow straight through indexing and we can serve it literally like by the time you’re typing the query it’s already ready to go.

I think we will continue to press on getting fresher and fresher results within our index. Whether you’ll have the ability to search and do site:mydomain.com and sort that by latest and how that will look I don’t know. But we are definitely going to pay a lot more attention to trying to make sure that we have fresh results.

In fact if you search by latest on “site:” right now you can often see pretty fresh results. So we’ll keep working on it, keep your eyes open and real-time fresh stuff is just going to keep getting fresher on Google.

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About the Author

Andy Johnson

Andy Johnson has been on the Internet since the its dawn(ie his first computer program was recorded on cassette tape) and his first hard drive cost about as much his current MacBook. His first byline was in 1993 for a local newspaper rag he eventually helmed, and his last “real job” was at a computer start up which ended when it ended. Throughout it all he’s freelanced and blogged. Now he is mesmerized by Search Engine Optimization forever trying to “rise to the top” for the right reasons. He’s been married to his wife Julia for as long as he can remember and has two lovely, wonderful children. He looks forward to sharing the latest in the technical best for all the online entrepreneurs.