Searching Twitter in real time is NOT searching the web in real time.

During a panel discussion, moderated by CNet’s Rafe Needleman, Twitter’s VP of Operations Santosh Jayaram confirmed that Twitter’s future was indeed search.

Twitter would soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages. What’s fascinating, and has (rightfully so) generated some buzz across the blogosphere is that two startups have begun to do this already. One, OneRiot and the other Tweetmeme, have already made strides into the area and have launched publicly today. Both are worthy tools in their own right but we should establish one important point, this is not real time web search, its real time Twitter search.

Bloggers and readers alike have announced this as the beginning of real time search, the dawning of a new era. Sadly, this is not the case. What this is, is the indexing of Twitter in real time – well that’s the goal anyway. Therefore, really, its ‘indexing-as-quick-as-people-can-find-it search.’

What will be the dawning of a new era is when Google or competitor can index the WEB in real time. Google have already made clear (just today in fact) that this is one of their major hurdles and something they want to achieve soon. Its no mean feat, but if anyone is likely to accomplish it, it’s Google not Twitter.