Google Real-Time Search and Its Impact on SEO

If you haven't already checked out Google Real-Time Search, just go do this:

• Go to http://google.com/trends
• Add "tiger woods" to the search box titled "More Hot Topics" at the bottom of the left column and click the "Search Latest" button
  
• When your results come up, click "Updates" in the left-hand column

Now watch the real-time Twitter tweets and Facebook, MySpace , YouTube, and Friendfeed updates as well as blog results roll in. Pretty amazing, huh? This is Google Real-Time Search. What does it mean?

It means that Google is now grabbing all of this information from social media as well as websites, indexing it and making it available in seconds anywhere, anytime. To be fair, Bing and Yahoo plan to add this capability as well, but Google is out there now. The implications are mind-blowing. Here are a few that come to mind:

1. Your "reach" in social media and search engines has just been expanded several light years.
2. Anything you say online is now available to everyone else (not just people who follow your updates) within seconds
3. If you contribute to a "hot topic", your 15 microseconds of fame starts now
4. How will Google deal with the mountains of spam that will erupt with this new tool? How will it decide what is spam and what is useful information?

Another major impact will be search engine optimization. It's not clear yet how real-time search will affect website page rank and other SEO-related factors. If you add a keyword-rich tweet with a link to a page on your website, will you get SEO credit? Will people start to flood Twitter and other social media sites with keywords instead of meaningful discussions? These are all hot topics for discussion and bear watching over the next few months as this technology develops and becomes more mainstream.

What are your thoughts and experiences with real-time search?