Google rolls out real-time search in South Africa

Google on Friday announced that the real-time search features it rolled out internationally last year will now be available on its South African search results. In December last year, the search giant introduced a string of new search innovations on Google.com, bringing their results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content.

After conducting a search, users can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter, MySpace and FriendFeed, including headlines from news reports and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, Google ranks these latest results to show the freshest information on the search results page.

Dylan Casey, product manager, Google said: “Search is a natural starting point for discovering the world’s information, and we strive to bring you the freshest, most comprehensive and relevant search results over an ever expanding universe of content on the multitude of devices you use to access it.”

“Try searching for a celebrity currently in the news, your favourite sports team or the latest political development. Whether it’s an eyewitness tweet, a breaking news story or a fresh blog post, you can find it on Google straight after it’s published on the web,” said Casey.

By clicking on “Latest results” or selecting “Latest” from the search options menu, users can get view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other web content scrolling on Google’s results page. Users can filter their results to see only “updates” from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others.

“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. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our partners including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.cah,” said Casey.

The latest results and the new search options are also designed for iPhone and Android devices.