The Members Forum

When some event is happening—such as an earthquake, a major court ruling, an iProduct launch, or a celebrity death—there's a certain group of users who want to see what people are saying about it across the entire Internet, right now. Twitter's search works decently enough in this case, but it's limited to Twitter. Now, Google users can get in on the action with Google's realtime search which, as per the name, lets you search what's being posted online in real time.

The search is eventually going to show up at google.com/realtime, but for now, you can check it out at its experimental URL. Originally introduced in December, the search has received "significant improvements" that allow you to narrow your search down in useful ways, such as by region or geography. The example that Google provides on its blog is one that I find particularly useful: if you're traveling to somewhere, you can narrow down the search to that city to see what people are talking about, whether it's current events, new restaurants, construction, or whatever else is going on.

You can also follow conversations—basically, if a tweet or a Facebook update sparks a number of back and forth replies from multiple users, Google allows you to see all of those posts to get the full context.

The graph across the top shows you spikes and valleys in your search, too. For example, a quick search for "tamales" shows me that conversations about the tasty treats peaked around 2pm today, and again at 4pm. Mentions of Ars Technica peaked at around 11am. My name got mentioned the most right around the time an article of mine got posted to the site.

Unlike some of Google's recent feature rollouts (we're looking at you, Google Voice in Gmail), the realtime search isn't just limited to the US or English speakers. The search itself is available in 40 languages, and the geographic refinements are available in English, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish so far.

ARS Technica has the details HERE!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRkYmx4A9Do