Real Time Search Comes to Google!

Google is finally rolling out its long-awaited real-time search option.

The search engine will now include some results in real-time on its main results page.

“Our users will get the results as they are produced,” said Google fellow Amit Singhal at an event in Mountain View in California.

How it works? Well, a search for “Obama” would include a constantly updated listing of the “latest results” on Obama pulled from live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles, and web pages. Click “pause” and the listing stops refreshing.

This is well and truly real time too. Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted something from the audience, and it appeared in the results immediately.

Google will offer realtime trends, similar to Twitter’s, and you’ll see the real time option labeled “latest” alongside the current past “day” and “hour”. This new realtime search will also work on both Android devices and iPhones immediately. There is also a way to filter results just to status updates from Twitter, Facebook etc.

Google’s just announced partnerships with both Facebook and MySpace, both of which will see Google pull in any available public data in real-time.

One can’t help but consider what lies in store for “real time search” start-ups like Topsy and OneRiot.

Real-time results will be rolled out to users over the next few days.