On Monday this week Google announced the arrival of Google Real Time Search (I would put a link to the announcement, but I am currently working from China and thus have no blogspot, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc.).

While Twitter was heralded as the 'real time' search engine, there are problems with using it as a real time search engine due to spam and the extremely fast pace of the Twitter feed (as demonstrated last week when Tony Abbott became liberal leader).

Google real time search is going to utilise Twitter among other things, but apparently will be able to filter out the spam, and include only powerful Tweets. They are still in negotiations with Facebook to utilise Facebook results.

Bing already integrates Tweets and Facebook into their search results, with Bing having a Twitter beta search engine (again, I can't show that here right now, because I can't get onto Twitter in China, but go to www.bing.com/twitter).

Google is likely to include Tweets, Google news, new web pages and relevant blog posts in real time feed, although I hear on the grape vine that at the moment it is mostly Tweets. Real time won't be instantly shown for every search, but rather when Google notices a 'trending topic'.

To optimise for real time search then, it is important to have relevant and timely content, but also that it needs to be on 'trending' topics, which would be difficult to anticipate, so would require vigilance if you want to be a part of it.