Google Goes Real Time… Really

Today Google has released its real-time search function. It will index much of the internet’s real-time content — such as tweets on Twitter or postings on Facebook or entries on blogs that have pubsubhubbub enabled RSS — and offer up these results for searchers in a dynamic fashion. So, for example, a search for [copenhagen climate summit] yields at fourth position on my screen an item titled “latest results for copenhagen climate summit” that displays dynamically the very latest updates on that topic from Twitter et al. The image below will give you a better sense, perhaps; click on it to see a full version:

This is clearly a pervasive function: I searched for [#slawca], which is the hashmark you can use to forward interesting tweets to us here at Slaw, and was rewarded with this at the top of my results:

Clicking on the “latest results” link gives you a new window in which only the stream of latest results is shown.

This is only the latest in a string of interesting features released by Google over the last few weeks, and I have to say that I continue to be very impressed by the speed and effectiveness with which Google innovates.