A bit like Gordon Gecko’s greed, our thirst for helping you find student jobs, internships, and work experience never sleeps. This week I’m taking a look at Google’s latest masterstroke: the appropriately titled ‘Google Realtime’. In the spirit of poor old redundant Stig, I’ll be giving it a wee test drive to see how it might help your job prospects. Grateful? Send your cheques to the usual address…

What Is It?

Actually launched back in December 2009 in a live test version, but kept relatively quiet until now, Google Realtime is a new service from Google that more or less does exactly what it says on the tin. Essentially, it provides a full set of the kind of as-it-happens results which have been popping up in Google’s main searches for a while now. However, whilst the main Google search function still deals mainly in a small rolling up-to-date news bar, Google Realtime lists updates of public information from various social media sites – notably Twitter, but also Facebook, Myspace and FriendFeed, amongst others.

How Might It Be Able To Help?

What with Twitter being a useful job searching resource, the provision of a function from Google to search updates in real time could be a fantastic fast, simple method to casually scour a specific job market. Updating in real time gives job-hunters the obvious advantage of locating the most recently added opportunities with the click of a button. Furthermore, Google Realtime has integrated the Google Alerts function, which means you can have daily, weekly or indeed realtime emails sent to you updating you on the results for a particular targeted search. Sounds too good to be true, right?

Is It Any Good?

Having spent some time fiddling around with the service available, my steadfast, foolproof, 100% scientific conclusion is: sorta. Or yes and no, if you prefer that. Here’s a short checklist of what I found…

• Make sure your searches are fairly specific if you want worthwhile results: This might seem like a no brainer, but unsurprisingly searching ‘internships’ is a complete waste of time as it’ll throw up any number of banal twitter updates from self-satisfied interns crowing that they’ve ‘just been accepted!!!!!’ or whinging about their first days. By contrast, something like ‘music pr internships london’ will bring up some useful stuff.
• The more targeted your searches, the more useful the Google Alert function is: Presumably you don’t want to be bombarded with hundreds of useless updates, but if you get specific with your search, then a regular update from Google won’t hurt. I would suggest the ‘once a day’ function is probably the best time interval, although if you are looking at a company you know might start advertising for internships then the real-time email updates could come into play.
• 99% of the stuff that’s thrown up is from Twitter: Unsurprising, given the nature of job hunting search criteria and the frequency of Twitter updates in comparison with public information on the other sites Google trawls. However, this does effectively just make Google Realtime another resource for searching out Twitter for jobs.

So, in short, Google Realtime is an additional string to the job-hunting bow, but students/graduates shouldn’t get too excited about revolutionary advancements. It’s still virtually in it’s infancy though, so who know what clever tricks Google may yet unleash on the Real Time format. Watch this space.

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