Google has revamped its search engine to allow it to display real-time results from a wide variety of online sources, in response to similar innovations from Yahoo and Bing.
Search results will now display live updates from social networking sites such as Twitter and Friendfeed, and headlines and news results published seconds earlier. A full page of the latest results will also be available in the new Latest tab.
Google yesterday announced partnerships with Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca to support its efforts.
The company has also added a new “hot topics” section to its Google Trends service, which will display real-time results of trending topics.
Google rivals Microsoft and Yahoo have both incorporated real-time data into their search results in the past two months.
The new feature has been introduced nearly two months after Google and rival Microsoft reached deals with Twitter to incorporate real-time Twitter updates into their products.
Google fellow Amit Singhal said the upgrade was an “important step in the evolution of information access.”
The company also showed off an experimental search feature for mobile devices - allowing users to conduct searches based on images taken from their handset cameras - and announced it had added Japanese language support to its mobile voice search tool.