How much will it take for Google to actually compete in this area, specifically against twitter and their summize search? Even if they didn't get access to the firehose, this data is already available via RSS feeds, Google would just need to crawl the RSS feeds of twitter users, which are (currently) most likely much fewer in number than the number of web pages that google crawls per hour, and update a temporal index (because as tweets age, they cease to remain "real time"), and show these along side their actual search results. "Your search for 'super bowl' returned this wikipedia article, espn.com and these currently active conversations". I suggest RSS feeds here because they are in the right format for extracting metadata about real time content (datetime, author, text).<p>In fact, if Google (or another major search engine, but right now only Google could do it) did change their interface to include "real time" results, it would encourage the rise and spread of more twitter-like services (because real time content would be increasingly easier to find). In fact, if Google included temporal RSS content next to the, for lack of a better term, archival content, and indexed comment threads also, the real time web would transcend just being provided by twitter.<p>Come to think of it, didn't Technorati attempt to do this with blog content, provide a "conversational pulse of the internet"?<p>Right now, Google classifies all content they receive, no matter when they receive it, as archival, and its freshness is only used to increase the perceived relevancy to float younger entries to the top.