There’s been a lot of buzz around real time search and indexing recently. Google buying Twitter? Bing using real time search? Friendfeed added real time search with Facebook hot on their heels.

Before I start looking at how Real Time Search will effect SEO’s, I wanted to clear up a few issues with the statement before I start – Firstly, there is currently NO real time search engine – Twitter isn’t real time, FriendFeed isn’t real time and Bing just uses Twitter – there’s still a lag between posting, crawling and appearing in search results. Secondly, a lot of these so called real time search engines are just seeking out social mentions NOT crawling the web and indexing it, more akin to buzz and trend monitoring tools than search engines.

The issue with real time search is it lacks authority and diversity, indexing and ranking a brand new piece of infomation without being able to check it’s authenticity would result in the SERP’s being filled with spammy posts with little or no high quality useful content. A lot of these real time searches rely on social media recognition, however the vast majority of online content is not content that the social media masses would find worthy of ‘Digging’ and therefore is not included in the results. I mean let’s face it – if real time search was as simple as the new engines are making out – Google would already be doing it.

So should SEO’s be worried? Not yet – real time search is still in it’s infancy, and until one of the serious traffic driving search engines manages to eliminate the issues related to real time search (spam, authority ranking and social media dependency) it won’t have a massive impact on the way standard users search the web.