With Google Wave recently and now Google Real Time Search results, you can now be connected to what is happening in real time. Google now crawls about 1 billion pages a day. Last week Google announced partnerships with Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, and Identi.ca as well as Twitter a few weeks previously and so we will now be seing “real-time” search results when we do a search on Google.

Facebook will be providing Google with a feed from their public profile pages. Myspace provides a feed from all of their users from any feed which is classified as “public”.

Just in case you have not seen what this looks like yet, here is an example…

Google Real Time Search

While this is sometimes integrated into the main page of search results, it does not appear for all searches but you can see this in action for yourself by clicking on the “Show Options” link under the search bar and choosing the “Latest” link in the left nav.

Real-time search became important when we saw the huge growth in Twitter over the last year… and what Google does is aggregate Twitter search with the other large social networking sites that have real-time feeds.

So What is Real-Time Search ?

According to one of Google’s leading expert’s Amit Singhal (video below) this is “Google’s Relevance technology meeting the Real-time web”.

There is so much information being generated now every single second that relevance becomes much more important and in order to deliver relevant results, Google’s algorithm needs to process this information and deliver this information to us. This was obviously one of the major reasons for launching Google Caffeine which is designed take the indexing and processing of search results to the next level.

What implications does Real-time Search have for SEO ?

The big question is how relevant is real-time search to your business? Should you be trying to have your own business featuring there?

If you are integrating SEO into your content production and PR then you probably don’t need to do anything different. The results are going to be influenced by what the public is saying and there is not much you can do to control that apart from ensuring the public gets the right messaaging about your product or service.

Google has developed “Query Fluctuation Models” into its algorithm to recognise what real-time information is relevant and what is not. If suddenly there are hundreds of comments about your business or brand on Twitter or Facebook, then Google will recognise the change in frequency.

This is genuine integration of social media with search and why large companies are trying to figure out how to integrate social media in their business.

With the growth of social media, the success of a business depends increasingly on what other people are saying about it because this information is in the public domain. People don’t just look at your own website to find out what you sell, but they look for reviews and ratings and what other people are saying on other sites – and now this is in real-time on Google.

What is the future of Real-time Search results?

This is an interesting question and has to do with the way we use Google. Google introduced universal search in May 2007 so that we get blocks of different types of search results such as video, images, blogs, and news in the first page of search results.

However when we search most of us are probably looking for one type of results, i.e. we either want to see the latest videos of our favourite musicians, or we want to look at product reviews, or maybe we want to get the latest real-time news. Universal search provides a wide range of different types of results on the same page.

If you are signed into a Google account you will get results personalized to the type of searches you do most often, however if not signed in you still get the wide range of results.

We can drill down into different types of results by using the navigation on the top or under the “Show Options” link however most people probably don’t use these different navigation options very often. Hopefully all that is about to change with a new interface coming out soon. Sign up to our RSS feed to stay tuned.

What are your thoughts on real-time search? Please leave your comments below and contribute to the conversation…

Video of Google’s Real Time Search Event