Update (19th Nov): Sometime after I published this post, the Cricket scores results have stopped coming on Google Search results.
Sometime back during the Cricket World Cup, Google Engineers in India came up with a nice gadget on Google Desktop to get Cricket Scores right on ones desktop. Live.
Now, Google has gone one step ahead and integrated cricket scores into Search. Brilliant! Ever since this got done, I have simply gone to Google and typed ‘cricket’ to check the score on the first result. I am sure its pretty popular and catching up (check Google trends and peaking of searches around September – most probably because of this integration)
One of the biggest reasons I do it, is speed. It means a lot, especially in the parts I come from, where many users still reach the Web via a dial-up line. Most often, I just want a broad update than ball-by-ball coverage. For that, its very annoying to load a full page (70+ Kb in size) with lots of text and even more ads (check this).
So, why wait for 1+ seconds when you can get it in less than a second (time taken on my comp to load a standard score page on a Cricket website and Google). And, the score update, taken from about 2-3 cricketing websites (ws-3.willow.tv, www.cricinfo.com, www.cricbuzz.com), is almost instantaneous. Either Google is crawling these sites really regularly or it has some sort of an understanding to share data and has a mechanism of regular updates with them. Now, if its the later, these websites better charge Google for the content they are providing.
There was one flaw in the reporting of scores on Google though. Nothing some additional programming could solve. Sometimes, the score shown is lower in a subsequent search. This was because Google was loading it from a different website (time stamp??) .
