Now Google on its search page gives real time results for keyword searches as tweets stream into Twitter. The results constantly update, and it has its own scroll bar.

For example, a search of Michael Jackson would show up a box which constantly refreshes itself, and more messages are added which can be scrolled.

For the regular user, Twitter might not have seemed like it would be of much use, but to marketers Twitter is a treasure chest of market research. It also seems to be the new tool to deliver breaking news. In most cases Twitter updates are faster than traditional news due to direct streaming from source.

Public opinion comes streaming in from different sectors and businesses who would like to assess their brand can use Twitter effectively. This potential of Twitter has got venture capital to the tune of $100 million dollars.

Google has not made a secret of its wishes to index more and more information. It has long expressed interest in real time results and in mining data from services like Twitter. This move will be beneficial to the search engine as well Twitter or any other future real time data services. They can avoid the delays of regular news sources which update their news at a much lesser frequency. Microsoft and Yahoo have also signed similar deals using the same reasoning.

People have questioned the longevity of Twitter once it allows its content to be searched. But analysts say search engines will now literally be able to listen in on the world’s conversations. Privacy issues have been brought up many time, but the public seems to like the open approach of Twitter.

News Corp owns a number of newspapers around the world including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Sun and The Times of London. The first reports about talks between Microsoft and News Corp pointed toward Microsoft paying millions to News Corp for exclusive search rights. Neither party however has made a formal statement to the press.

Murdoch has repeatedly expressed his displeasure about people accessing news content free on the web. With the traditional newspaper industry slowly moving toward its demise, Murdoch seems to be trying to hedge the same fate for its online version. He states that the consumer should pay for receiving quality reporting from its newspapers.

The actual act of taking its content off of Google isn’t very complicated. They simply need to include a robots.txt file on the website which instructs Google’s crawler to not index its pages. However the more important question is how wise is Murdoch’s move.

To help get a clearer picture of the consequences we look at a few numbers. Google has been responsible for almost 25% of Wall Street Journal’s traffic. This is higher than any other source that drives traffic to its site.  Removing its content from Google could potentially kill this section of their market.

The flip-side is that Microsoft is willing to pay millions to News Corp to index its sites. Since print and advertising revenue has been slumping big time, this could mean added short term revenue for News Corp. In the long term however, they risk becoming irrelevant in the news industry.

This is simply because Google dominates the search market at present. If users do not see news from WSJ or its other news sites on Google News, they will most likely just click on the next available source. And there are definitely going to be third party sources that simply plagiarize News Corp’s content and put them up on their sites. These sites in turn will get more traffic.

Google hasn’t been overly alarmed by this development. Matt Brittin, Google’s UK director had this to say “Economically it’s not a big part of how we generate revenue.”

Whatever might be the outcome; this marks the aggressive plot that Microsoft seems to be using to attack Google. Steven Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, is fixated on beating Google at its own game.

Google has the Google calculator which tries to mimic Wolfram’s product, but isn’t quite the same. For people involved with SEO, this could mean some added work. To service websites who would like their content used for quantitative purposes it might be needed to follow a slightly different approach to what is needed for text based search.

To add to Bing’s aggressive attempt at catching up with Google they have started to return richer results. Results no longer are just links to other websites. Bing actively pulls up media and tools hosted on various sites and return them in the results. For instance, they retrieve videos from Hulu and YouTube, provide airline ticket info and even offer weather updates.

Google has been working secretively on a search engine algorithm called Caffeine. It isn’t slated to be rolled out until 2010 but is said to be a very powerful change Google is looking to bring in. Initial data suggests there won’t be a big shake up in the results retrieved, although many suggest the impact is being downplayed as Google does not want to create a panic among web developers. Caffeine is said to include a real-time search as well as have improved indexing capabilities.

Yahoo has been struggling to break to the forefront in the search engine market. In October, 2009 they stated that they will be ending the paid placements program by the end of 2009. The notable change they are about to offer is the real-time search capability that will be executed in partnership with OneRiot. They will be covering social networking structures like Twitter, an area where Google isn’t in yet. SEO professionals will be watching closely to all these changes to see how they will have to adapt.

All the commotion we are seeing exposes the amount of work that search engine giants need to put in to either maintain their top spot or try and chase down its competitors. Internet users on the other hand can sit back and enjoy exponentially better services from these companies as they battle it out for market share. Currently the search engine market is split up roughly as: 64% Google, 16% Yahoo, 10% Bing, and the remaining 10% between AOL, Ask etc. Though Google has a lion’s share of the market, the competition isn’t willing to give them a free ride. This pretty much ensures that Google doesn’t relax at any point and doesn’t behave like it has monopoly.

“Interacting with other people is so personal and emotional to every single person out there. It’s important for every company out there.” said Cheng.

And Lili Cheng comes ably qualified to lead FUSE. According to Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, “I’ve known Lili for many years, and have long been impressed by her vision and ability to create; to engage yet to also inspire; to lead; to make tough choices; to deliver.”

With technology changing so rapidly, they are faced with the task of getting products out into the market early so they can assess the potential of different social tools. Dealing with social sites like Facebook, Twitter etc., is the key focus of FUSE at present. FUSE will work with Microsoft in different departments from Bing to Xbox, depending on their product needs.

Predicting how the future of social communication will look is getting harder and harder. This inherent rapid changing behavior of social computing is the primary reason why FUSE was put in place.  Coming up with products that fit social communication into Microsoft’s products in the shortest time frame is the challenge they face. As users we can hope for some interesting tools that could come out of this group of Microsofties.