Danny and I reported at Search Engine Land on the Google Web Search Tests Getting More Social. Last week, Google began adding a realtime counter and "shared by" links in the web search results, on certain news one box results.
The Google Blog acknowledged it over the weekend. They said:
Since Realtime Search launched in December of last year, we’ve steadily updated the feature making it more comprehensive and easier to use. This week we added a Realtime counter underneath the News section of your search results. Now, when people on your favorite social networks are commenting on a particular topic you’ve searched for, you can easily see how many updates have been shared, all in real-time. This makes it easy to see when a news story is popular on the social web. Click the link to see the full Realtime Search results page.
Here is a picture:
Search Engine Land has many more images, so check it out. I personally only see the shared by links and not the realtime counter feature. There is not much forum discussion on this user interface and functionality addition to the Google web search results, at least not yet.
Forum discussion at Google Blogoscoped Forums and WebmasterWorld.
