Last Monday Google launched ‘real-time search’ which integrates stuff happening around the web including live tweets from Twitter, public Facebook pages, MySpace stream data, and more.

In past months while Twitter was gaining substantial fame there was talk in the industry that Twitter may become a better way to search for something that is ‘current’ due to the real-time nature of the platform. While I never put much stock into this, it is clear now that Google has no intention of losing their position as being the leader in searching for information… archive, real-time or otherwise.

With this update, Google remains at the center of the search hub and is now even stronger and can provide more relevant data to searchers.

Yahoo, one of Google’s biggest competitors, obviously was not far behind. Last Thursday Yahoo started including recent Twitter posts in their web search results as well. Their approach is a bit different and Yahoo appears to be only interested in the hottest of topics. Yahoo claims that their search algorithm can determine the most relevant tweets and then figures out where to include that information on the search results page.

We are definitely seeing a merging of new social media and traditional web searches, which should make for a more interesting SEO (search engine optimization) landscape.