Last week Mashable’s Pete Cashmore wrote, for CNN, 10 Web Trends to Watch in 2010. First on that list is an increase in real-time search options. Today, Google announced that they will be rolling-out their own real-time search options over the next few days. Google’s real-time search will draw results from a wide variety of places including Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed. Real-time search results will appear within the regular list of search results. The real-time search results will continously update unless you pause the updates. See my screen capture below.

You can get a preview of how Google’s Real-Time search will work by visiting the Trends page and clicking on a trend.

The video below provides a brief overview of Google’s Real-Time search.

Applications for Education
Real-time search engines are great resources to have when a story is breaking. These resources could be put to use by students in a current events course or in a journalism course. When I taught a current events course one of my favorite things to do was to have students analyze the reporting of one story from multiple sources. Real-time search brings in not only the stories from the major news outlets, but also brings in the “person on the street” perspective from social networks like Twitter and FriendFeed.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
Collecta, Real-time Search, and Professional Learning
Real-Time Search Options