Methinks the best experience will end up combining real time search with regular web search. Yes, it’s nice to have unfiltered immediate information in certain situations like breaking news or emergencies. Outside of that synthesis is essential to keep the noise to signal ratio down.
I don’t so much mind the metaphor used on TechCrunch today of consciousness and memory.
Imagine having just memory or just real time consciousness – it somehow wouldn’t be very efficient for the processing of information into action. TC brings this up. Yesterday’s Michael Jackson and celebrity death coverage and the malware issues showcases that without some non-real time synthesis things get pretty messed up.
Thinking through this is not that hard. Though you can’t use citation analysis to filter results like in PageRank, you can do similar things to get some confidence interval in the real time results. However, the more accurate you make that the more processing time it will take and, thus, it will be less real time. I think some hybrid of rapid filtering with a real time pressentation of streams with a big note that says UNFILTERED or UNVERIFIED should do just fine at the top of regular web results.
I’d use that kind of experience, for what it’s worth…
