Last month Google announced the launch of their Real Time Search engine. By including real time search results Google has now officially embraced the updatesphere as a subsphere of “The Web,” as may be seen in the following figures.

Fig. 1: Part of the main index

Fig. 2: Updates as a subcategory of index results

Fig. 3: The updatesphere

In my real time web results Google is indexing updates performed within the three popular micro-blogging platforms: Twitter, FriendFeed and Identi.ca. Notably absent are the status updates from the social networking site Facebook because of its partial walled garden structure. However, it may not be long before these updates will be included as well because Google recently made a deal with Facebook¹. However, it is interesting to note that Google will only receive Facebook updates from public updates on pages (such as fan pages) while competing search engine Bing will receive updates from public profile pages (personal profiles) that are marked as visible for everyone.

Already in 2008 Google started expanding its indexing focus to actions within social networks but the indexed actions were quite messy, for example:

• silvertje has started 0 topics. silvertje has made 1 reply. … silvertje replied on May 13, 2009 06:25 to the question “We want all …”
• Anteek added a contact: Anne Helmond. MyBlogLog Action submitted by Anteek -
• Uploads from Anne Helmond, tagged… – http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvertje/tags/amsterdam/
• Qik | Anne Helmond | Untitled. Streamed by Anne Helmond. More at http://qik.com/silvertje.

These actions performed on social objects² such as Flickr photos, blog posts and videos, seemed to be Google’s first steps into real-time search. By partnering up with Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca and Twitter, Google has now officially welcomed the updatesphere.

Twitters’ status updates have been included in Google’s index for a while but they are now actively promoted on the main site:

Google Social Search and the statussphere

Please note that this screenshot shows the Social Search experiment, part of Google Labs > Experimental Search. It seems that -while writing- Google removed the real-time social results from the main site and moved it to its Labs.

Status updates are moving from the Web sphere to its own distinct sphere: the updatesphere. Google is acting as a demarcating engine in the construction of the updatesphere.³

1. Google its official partners are: “Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.” Google, Relevance meets the real-time web[↩]
2. social because they the objects are part of social web services that allow other people to participate in the objects by tagging, rating, leaving a comment, embedding or favoring for example[↩]
3. For more on web spheres: R. Rogers, The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. (38p) [pre-print pdf][↩]

In February I graduated cum laude with a thesis on blog software and search engines titled ‘Blogging for Engines. Blogs under the Influence of Software-Engine Relations.’ It aims to add the study of software-engine relations to the emerging field of Software Studies, which may open up a new avenue in the field by accounting for the increasing entanglement of the engines with software thus further shaping the field.

This thesis wishes to contribute to the understanding of blogs by approaching blogs as both a medium and bi-product of practice that are both entangled in software-engine relations. In the history of blogging both the medium and practice are constantly being shaped by the search and indexing engines. Not only did the introduction of the ‘nofollow’ attribute have a major impact on the construction of the blogosphere, it also points to how the blogger is (un)willingly entangled in a relationship that the blog software establishes with the engines. The common blog practices of tagging, social bookmarking and the obsessive checking of blog statistics raise the question if we are now blogging to feed the engines. Continue to read an excerpt of my PhD proposal to continue my research on software-engine relations, or download the PDF ‘Blogging for Engines. Blogs under the Influence of Software-Engine Relations.’ (4,2 Mb)

Excerpt PhD Proposal on Software-Engine Relations

Google as the number one search engine is regarded by many to be “the start page for the Internet” (Dodge, 2007) and “Google has become such a commonly used resource that people are beginning to regard it as synonymous with the Web.” (Searls in Gudrais, 2007). What is missing from the current studies into software is the recognition of the central role that the engines play on the web. The engines are considered to be the starting point of the web and play an important editorial role on the web. Introna and Nissenbaum (2000) describe the politics of search engines with the engines

[...] determining any systematic inclusions and exclusions, the wide-ranging factors that dictate systematic prominence for some sites, dictating systematic invisibility for others. These, we think, are political. They are important because what people (the seekers) are able to find on the Web determines what the Web consists of for them. And we all —individuals and institutions alike— have a great deal at stake in what the Web consists of.

The politics of inclusion and exclusion in the search engines, which may also be described as the drama of search engines (Govcom.org, 2007), is clearly visible in the case of the website 911truth.org which suddenly disappeared from Google results. These issues raise the question if and how the web is structured by search engines. Rogers (2008) describes how the engines are demarcating different spheres on the Web. Previous research done with the Digital Methods Initiative (2007) not only showed how the engines construct different spheres but also how these spheres are constructed differently by different engines.  What role does the software play in the construction of these different spheres?

Previous research into the role of software and the engines in the blogosphere showed that there is an increasing symbiotic relationship between the two (Helmond, 2008). In this study into the most prevailing blog software, WordPress, it appeared that is is establishing strong ties with Google, Google Blog Search and Technorati. The blog software and blog engines determine the nature and construction of the blogosphere through co-construction. These software-engine relations enforce a steady regime in the blogosphere that puts the blogger in a position where the politics of inclusion and exclusion are played out in the game of search engine optimization and spam.

(Excerpt from my PhD proposal)