Not sure how conclusive that really is. To me their heat map tells me that people are blind to results that aren't at the top of the page. If the real-time results were at the top I'm sure people would pay more attention to them.
Often the real-time results (especially from twitter) have duplicates or simply very sparse info that may scroll by too fast, making it easy to just ignore altogether. The real-time results box on google also feels cramped to me.<p>It can be useful if you're aware of what it is and the likely nature of the rt-results (or if that's precisely what you're looking to see) and willing to sit and watch or scroll through. How often that is done or is useful is a question.
I tend to skip right over the "real time" Twitter results when they show up in Google. When I'm on Google, I'm looking for websites, not tweets.<p>And who thought sticking an auto-scrolling iframe in the middle of the search results page was a good idea?