Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Real Time Search Results by Google

We knew it was inevitable, and now it’s here: Google has just launched real-time search integrated into search results pages.


Google real-time search updates as stuff is happening around the Web — for example, live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles and Web pages now stream in on the actual result pages for your query. It works on mobile too (at least iPhone (iPhone) and Android (Android) for now).


Here’s a video demo from Google:





 MySpace and Facebook Deals


That’s not all, Google’s announced that they’ve inked partnerships with both Facebook and MySpace to pull in data in real-time. For Facebook, that means public Facebook Pages, and for MySpace, it means any stream data that is publicly available. This is on top of the partnership that the company announced with Twitter back in October.


Live Within Days 


See the picture below:



I searched for "tigers mother in law" and it showed me all updated news one after the other. Try it yourself here.


Google says the features aren’t available to everyone yet, but will be within the next few days. However, all users can see it now via a “Hot Topics” feature that’s been added to Google Trends. Click on any trend, then click a “Hot Topic,” and you’ll see the new “Latest Results” area of Google search results. For example, you can currently see real-time updates for the Tiger Woods story.


Staying in Front of the Inevitable


For some time, it’s been clear to us that search has been moving to real-time, but until now, Google was seemingly falling behind Twitter (Twitter), and even perhaps Bing (Bing) (who inked its own search deals with Twitter and Facebook earlier this year).


Now, with one sweeping stroke, Google has grabbed the lead in the real-time search space, and it appears that Facebook and Twitter have both conceded that they aren’t going to outbuild Google when it comes to search. These are significant strategic decisions for all of those involved that will dictate much of where these companies head in the years to come.