Google search adds Twitter-Facebook-MySpace feeds

Google began adding real time results to its Internet search engine on Monday, channeling feeds from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other fresh content into responses to queries.

"We are here today to announce Google real time search," Google fellow Amit Singhal said at a press event held near the firm's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

"Users will get results on results page as they are being produced out there. This is the first time ever that a search engine has integrated the real time Web into the results page," Singhal said.

Twitter messages and other fresh content streamed into a box on Google's main search page in a demonstration of the new feature, which will be rolled out at all English-language search sites in the coming days.

Google is planning to incorporate real time search in other languages beginning early next year, according to Singhal.

Online social-networking rivals MySpace and Facebook will be providing feeds of all public updates.

"MySpace and Facebook users can decide what they want to see offered at Google," said Google vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer.

Google is working on a standard software interface Facebook and MySpace can use to stream updates to the Internet search titan in real time.

Twitter feeds were in Google real-time results on Monday, but Facebook and MySpace updates will not be integrated until possibly as late as February of next year, according to Mayer.

"I'm super-excited that we are doing this," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said while leaving the event. "I'm so psyched. It's the future, like 'Star Trek.'"

Google will only display updates from Facebook Public pages, "fan pages" used by celebrities, athletes and other high-profile people interested in firing off text messages to large numbers of followers.

MySpace will let all users permit online comments, pictures, video or other content created in profiles to be displayed in Google's real time results, according to MySpace chief product officer Jason Hirschhorn.

"We look at this as an extension of their self expression," Hirschhorn told AFP. "We want people to hear their comments and opinions and what better way than to have them next to results on a Google search?"

Google engineers could have crafted Web-crawling computer code to hunt down and index public posts from micro-blogging star Twitter and social networking services but preferred to work with the firms, according to Mayer.

"We really do value the partnerships," Mayer said. "For social networks one of the key factors is user privacy.

"It is really important that they have some element of control and having a partnership makes it more comfortable for them," she said.

Google is eager to have a platform in place to allow bloggers, social networks and other producers of real time online content to instantly route updates to the search engine.

An aspiration is to one day be able to personalize search so that Google blends public information with private updates individuals have access to in online social networks.

"That is something we are far away from," Mayer said. "But, in the end, you really hope that the search engines can search the Web the way you see it. If you can see it, we should be able to search it. That is our goal."