As the social media community explodes all over the world, almost every user has heard of services like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. However there is yet to be a real monetisation strategy to take advantage of these great social communities. When you access these sites, you get the odd advert appear, which is relevant to what you have specified in your profiles etc. However, three of the most popular search engines on the web are trying to see if they can make their search service better than the rest by investing in technologies that are based around the social networking infrastructure.

Real-time search could be the future of search as we know it. At the moment, you can access a social networking website and add a status update or tweet whenever you feel the need, and users are informed of the update right away. If this could be transferred to search engines the impact could be huge, as 2 major boxes would be ticked. Firstly, users would get search results based on real-time occurrences, and secondly, they would be relevant. Both of these factors are key to all of the major search engines, and to have this in place would be of huge benefit to users. Currently, the search engine results are based on slightly historic data, which means users are not presented with the latest fresh information for every search term that they type in. For Search Engine Marketing firms this could be great news as the playing field would be a lot more level and everyone would have the chance to gain number one spot throughout the month, if not for a few hours at least. This would mean giving Google what it has wanted from the very start. As part of an Internet Marketing campaign you would have to produce, fresh, original and regularly updated content that is well syndicated and available for everyone to read.