Google Improves Real-Time Search Engine

Searching for status updates is not Twitter's forte, so leave it to Google to make its own Realtime Search engine more powerful instead.

Realtime Search combs Twitter and Facebook for public status updates. Google introduced the tool in December, sticking it in a sidebar under the category "Updates," but Realtime Search is now rolling out to google.com/realtime as well.

The most important new feature of Realtime Search is geographic filtering of status updates. By whittling down Twitter posts to your city or Zip code, you can find out, for example, whether there are any upcoming concerts worth seeing.

If you want these kinds of updates delivered to you, without pro-actively searching for them, Google now allows you receive status updates through Google Alerts, by selecting "Updates" from the "Type" drop-down menu.

The last addition to Realtime Search is conversation view, which lets you see all the replies to a single status update.