Google ‘indexing’ now Real-Time

I’m sure I read a quote somewhere saying that PubSubHubbub is like the Web on Crack (I can’t seem to find the quote). I’m not crazy enough to have tried Crack but it must be good if it’s anything like the new publish/subscribe messaging paradigm.  PubSubHubbub is the Google initiative which, in plain English, monitors RSS and Atom Feeds and distributes the content at break-neck speed. Sick of waiting hours or days for your content to be indexed then you will love PubSubHubbub!

Essentially this great new Pub/Sub paradigm means that content published by you and I via RSS or Atom is distributed to the wide world like, now! Here’s an example of how it works;

Feedburner used to check for updated site feeds every 15 minutes or so. This obviously meant a delay from the time of publishing new content until the content appeared in Feedburner. Google Search, Technorati etc. would then take further hours or days to include the new content in SERPs (Search Results Pages). As of a few days ago, if you have PingShot enabled in Feedburner, then as soon as new content appears in your Site feed it will be available in your Feedburner feed. Almost at the same time any Content system hooked up to PubSubHubbub will pick up the new content (rather than waiting hours or days for the many bots to index your site).

In the good old days before PubSubHubbub (o.k., it was only a few days ago), we’d ping the various services (ping-o-matic, Icerocket, King Ping, Yahoo etc.) when we published new or changed content to ask them to reindex our sites. PubSubHubbub should make this need redundant as it won’t be necessary for the various content systems and Search Engines to index sites for every bit of new or amended content. The content can be attained from PubSubHubbub in near real-time.

I have done a bit of surfing about PubSubHubbub and how this will affect the need to ping the various services. Unfortunately there appears very little information available as to who will attain information from PubSubHubbub and if the need for pinging still remains (I certainly won’t be ceasing pinging until more information is available about PubSubHubbub and the need for pinging).

P.S. It’s pretty awesome that as I publish this post it’ll be available on Google search for those looking for information about this topic.