Google announced a dozen things yesterday, but one of those announcements was on real time search in the search results. Google teamed up with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca to make these real time search results possible.
In short, Google sticks another "universal result" in the search results when they feel a real time result makes sense. For example, a search for popeye, which is currently trending due to the Google Doodle Popeye logo, shows this real time result:
Yes, that is my tweet showing a link to this site. In fact, it also shows other Tweeting links to my story. Here is a link to the real time landing page results.
Here is a video explaining this in more detail:
We have threads on this announcement at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums. The consensus in the threads are that this clutters up the search results even more and do not provide a simple interface for people to find relevant results. Of course, most SEOs don't want their web results pushed down in the search results page - but SEOs will adapt and use Twitter, Facebook and so on to make sure their results do show up in that area when applicable.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.
