BANGALORE, INDIA: The value of real time information on the web has increased manifold especially after the arrival of Twitter. And search engines like Google, Yahoo!, etc have been trying to reduce the gap between fresh indexing of the web from months to mere minutes. Today, you can get search results that are just seconds old - including blogs, headlines, tweets and feeds from Facebook.

Real time search
Both Bing and Google now support Twitter search results. Whenever you enter a popular search term in Google search engine, your result page will include a section called ' Latest results for' that features a constantly updating window of real time results. ?Latest results for' usually show up about half way down the first results page. Earlier people used to visit a page, click a link that seemed relevant and visit another page. Now they spend a lot of time monitoring streams of data including tweets, status updates, etc from services like Twitter and Facebook and blogs.

Now search engines feature tweets and updates on the result page based on their gravity. A Twitter user who attracts many followers, and whose tweets are often 'retweeted' by other users, can generally be assumed to have more authority. Similarly, Facebook users gain authority as their friends multiply, particularly if those friends also have many friends.

You can zoom to any point in time and 'replay' what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try this out, simply click 'Show options' on the left hand side of the search results page and then select 'Updates.' The first page will show you the familiar latest and short-form updates from a set of sources including Twitter. Also there is a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period. Here we've searched for 'Fifa world cup 2010' and browsed to see July 8, 2010.

The latest from Yahoo! on real time data is the enhanced Search Assist. The enhancement provide near real-time suggestions as you type your query. You probably already use this tool to conduct your searches quickly, but now you can get even fresher suggestions, which will be useful when there are recent top news or events related to your search topic.