Google launches real-time search

Google announced Monday the fruits of its earlier deal with Twitter, showing off how it has decided to present real-time Internet content within search results.
Amit Singhal, Google fellow, introduced the real-time section during an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. "We are here today to announce Google real-time search," Singhal said, calling it
"Google relevance technology meets the real-time Web."

Twitter search will show the latest matches for a particular search term, but Google wants to do more than sort results by time.

"Relevance is the foundation of this product," Singhal said. "It's relevance, relevance, relevance."
Google will build a section called "latest results" into the regular Google search results page that automatically refreshes Internet content from sources like Twitter.

Singhal showed off how a search for "Obama" would bring up tweets, Web pages, and other Internet content related to the president as it was generated. At the Web 2.0 conference in October, Google struck a deal with Twitter to get access to the service's "firehose" of tweets.

Google plans to roll this out over the next several days, and not all users may see the new section immediately, Singhal said. The company also announced partnerships with social-networking companies Facebook and MySpace to display updates from those services.

Real-time search at Google involves more than just social-networking and microblogging services. While Google will get information pushed to it through deals with those companies, it also has improved its crawlers as to index and display virtually any Web page as it is generated.

Facebook updates posted to public Facebook Pages will be indexed, while any Myspace update designated as public will appear in search results.

Google also demonstrated a Google Labs project called "Google Goggles," which allows a smartphone user to take a picture of a given object and send it to Google in hopes of finding out more information that object.

Up until the real-time announcement, mobile search was ruling the day, as Google's Vic Gundotra demonstrated Google Goggles, a new Android application that can show locations of interest surrounding a GPS position, and the ability for Japanese speakers to now use Google's voice search features.