Google’s real-time search now live in the U.K.

by on December 9, 2009 at 7:33 pm

December 9, 2009 | Kim-Mai Cutler

realtimesearch

Google’s newly announced real-time search is now not just limited to the Trends page. It’s now live across searches on Google.co.uk. (I just tried it with “Ethan Beard”, who is director of the Facebook Developer Network and is speaking on stage at Le Web right now.) The search giant announced the new feature on Monday — it pulls in public data from Twitter, MySpace and Facebook and uses it to surface content that’s been recently published and shared.

Basically, when users search for something, the most recent news articles and posts on sites like Twitter will be immediately into your results, and those results will be updated immediately as new articles and tweets appear.

  • If you do a search for “Obama,” you can see the latest news articles and tweets, and as you look at the page, more updates are added as they are published.
  • Google has already added time filters to its different search options, so you can just see results from the past day or hour. Now it’s adding an option called “latest,” highlighting these real-time results, as well as an “update” view showing each addition to the search results as it’s published.
  • These real-time results will be available on Android phones and iPhones as well.

Google says it developed “dozens of new technologies” to make this happen, such as a language model that can recognize which updates contain new information, and which are just “weather buoys” automatically repeating information posted by others.