Google has launched real-time search which will allow people to know what the world is talking, including on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
As well as announcing real-time search, the search giant announced deals with Facebook and MySpace to include public updates from the sites in their “latest results” feed on the normal Google results pages. Other info will appear in these “latest results” including Tweets, blog posts, news information, with the aim to give users an ability to tap into conversations that billions of people are having as they happen.
An entry on Google’s Blog said: “Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we'll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.
“Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it's happening, even if it's not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn't know about it beforehand.
Google said it would not have been able to launch without the support of the partners it also announced today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca, as well as Twitter, which was announced a few weeks ago.
The new features will be rolling out in the next few days and will be available globally in English. The new search can be tried out by visiting Google Trends and clicking on a "hot topic," which in most cases will take users to a search results page with the new real-time feature.
MySpace chief product officer Jason Hirschhorn also blogged on the launch: “Through comments, status updates, and activities, our millions of global users are constantly socializing around the content that matters most to them. This constant activity creates a stream of information that provides a snapshot of what our users are saying and doing at any particular moment in time: a pulse of pop culture. Until today, that rich stream of user interaction and expression has not been publicly available or searchable.
“For MySpace, this effort represents a unique way to weave our social activity into Google queries, while making it easier for users to find relevant and timely content.”
He added: “As always, we’ve taken steps to protect user privacy - the information we share with Google is limited to only the content that users choose to make public on MySpace.”
