Google has added real-time results to its search engine, offering users instant information pulled from a variety of websites, including social network sites like Twitter and Facebook.
The firm hopes that the development will provide users with more relevant search results.
“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,” said Google fellow Amit Singhal in a blog post. “When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.”
It is primarily aimed at breaking news stories that are being covered in real-time on sites such as Twitter, but it will also feature content from billions of web pages, Singhal said.
“Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day,” Singhal wrote.
The company has also updated Google Trends by adding ‘hot topics’, which Singhal said will show the most common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time.
