I though crossed my mind that makes me question if advertising is anything close to being an appropriate element of real-time search today. The thought came to me when realizing that there’s so much sentiment data that’s been pulled together from tweets, that any query you throw at a Google real-time search engine would be easily answerable through the sentiment of posts users have made on your concern.

“Are headphone Brand X good or worth buying?”

If we make an assumption that recently is less a concern in this sort of query (but that the user still wants to query the real-time channels, organizing the results for this query by their sentiment makes maybe the most sense. How many results return positive messages on buying brand x versus negative ones?

Aside: My prediction is that any good real-time search engine will not simply return real-time messages that contain the keywords form my query, but will use message attributes like “in reply to” to look up all the responses have returned whenever someone asked a question like it.

So I’ve made the query, and I see Brand X makes pretty bad headphones based on the sentiment of the results to my query, and now Google (or whoever) is showing me an ad for Brand Y headphones. What’s my very first instinct in this case?

…”Does brand Y make good headphones worth buying?”

And until I get a result that I’m happy with, I’ll keep using the ads as my guide for what to search next.
To go really out on a limb on this specific example. If Google knew what ads to show me based on my first query, that Brand Y is related to what I searched, Brand X, what would be stoping them from doing that leg work for me?
“You searched Brand X headphones and got the result that they are no good, but here’s the result of all these other headphones made by Brand Y, Brand Z, and Brand W for you to look at. Looks like Brand W got the best response. You can further investigate our results by clicking this link, or if you want to buy right away click this second link”.
Who knows what real-time search will end up looking like.