Google adds real-time search to its results page

Updated

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Google’s results are about to speed up, with what the company says is “the first time ever any search engine has integrated the real-time web into the results page.”

Basically, when users search for something, the most recent news articles and posts on sites like Twitter will be appear in your results, and those results will be updated immediately as new articles and tweets appear. Google executives are on-stage in Mountain View, Calif. describing the product right now, and while they haven’t offered a comprehensive description of everything that’s included in these results, they did offer a few examples and details:

• If you do a search for “Obama,” you can see the latest news articles and tweets, and as you look at the page, more updates are added as they are published.
• Google has already added time filters to its different search options, so you can just see results from the past day or hour. Now it’s adding an option called “latest,” highlighting these real-time results, as well as an “update” view showing each addition to the search results as it’s published.
• Google will include public updates from Facebook and MySpace users as well, through just-announced partnerships with both companies. [Update: The Facebook deal is limited to Facebook Pages and does not include user profiles.]
• These real-time results will be available on Android phones and iPhones as well.

Google says that to make this happen, it developed “dozens of new technologies”, such as a language model that can recognize which updates contain new information, and which are just “weather buoys” automatically repeating information posted by others.

Real-time results will be rolled out to users over the next few days. Supposedly this will be available in all English-speaking countries. If you don’t want to wait for Google to activate it for you, you can also see it by using the “hot topics” search option here.

Here’s a demo video.