Blending "Real-time" results in resultlist

Today I had a meeting with a client and an external party that is going to develop the internal and external websites (intranet and internet) for them.

Subject of the meeting was the relation that the (re)development of the websites have with "search" functionality. We tried to get a vision on how the sites could evolve with the use of search technology.

Of course the issue of relevancy came to speak and I explained that relevancy is subjective and influenced or even driven by the context of the user and even of the context of the information it self (the semantics of information but it would be off-topic to get into that in this post).

One aspect of relevancy, "freshness" or "new information" triggered the person from the webdesign / webbuilding company to refer to Google and the integration of real-time result into their search results. He presented this as if current information came op automatically when searching for something and that this proved that the freshness of information was taken into account when calculating the relevance of all the results.

I would like to differ on this statement. When I look at the integration of real-time information in search results, Google has made a seperate section to show results from real-time sources like Twitter. This is the only way to do this, because there is a difference between "freshness" of a result and the "information value" of other results. You can not mix 140 character messages about, for instance, the islam with a profound description of what the Islam is al about.

Just watch this video and you will see what I mean. The Google interface serves 2 information needs by "clustering" the results in a "real-time"-section and a "contents / value based"-section.