The most popular search engine wants to deliver information at the speed of light

Among
a number of surprises made today at its Mountain View, CA search event,
Google announced that, within days, it will be implementing real-time
search returns into search results pages.
Much in the same way that movie showtimes or related news results
appear in small widgets separate from the regular links results,
real-time results will also appear in a separate box. What will be
different, but not unexpected for something designed to deliver
real-time results, is that this new widget will continually update as
relevant real-time posts come in.
For example, searching for "Obama" will deliver the latest comments
related to Obama's doings today. Similarly, a search for "traffic on
101" will deliver actual perspectives on the status of that particular
freeway.
As Google Fellow Amit Singhal explained at today's Google Search Event
today, the company has acknowledged that part of being the best search
engine in 2009 is crawling through all the non-static pages--Twitter
feeds, public Facebook feeds, public MySpace feeds, blog posts,
etc.--for the most pressing and relevant information: "The importance
of relevance has gone through the roof as the
amount of information out there is growing. Relevance has become the
critical factor."
"Light can travel around the world in 1/10th of a second, and we
won’t rest until the speed of light is the only barrier to getting good
search results to you," said Singhal.
This announcement was actually foreshadowed by similar news last week that Google would be adding real-time news results to Google Finance pages.
Google says real-time results will start appearing in users' searches
over the next few days, though some say that they have already seen
real-time results popping up today.
A demo of the new technology can be viewed at YouTube.