Google goes real-time with search

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Google has taken its search real time, adding tweets and other social networking updates as well as breaking news to its results.

The search giant and its rival Bing both announced a move to real-time using Twitter on the same day in October, and Google is set to roll out the system over the next few days, and also include other social networks like Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca.

"Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before," wrote Google Fellow Amit Singhal on the company's blog.

"When they are relevant, we'll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page."

Enter a search term, and the standard results still come up, but underneath them is a constantly updating box of "latest results".

This means you can find what others are saying as they say it, "right after" it's published, Google said.

"Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it's happening, even if it's not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn't know about it beforehand," Singhal said.

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