Yes - Google does it yet again!

Besides the unveiling two days ago of their integration of Gmail with a subset of the voice calling functionality found in Google Voice, Google has delivered another coup - this time by providing a separate search feature called Google Realtime.

Realtime delivers virtually instantaneous results from searches at sites that host continuously updated information, like posts from the Twits (oops) Twitterers. Read more about it here. And here.

They are currently rolling the service out, but it's available to all by going to this special page. It seems that this will be the actual page.

Google, as well as other search engines (e.g. Bing) have done this for awhile, but Google is the first to separate the feature from its main search page. You can read about the advantages of this approach in the "here" links I cite above. One more here! And hints on how to use it here.

One thing I really love is a timeline slider (which you can vaguely see above the search results in the pic at top), allowing you to see when stories on a particular topic ebb and peak, and which allows you to time-travel based on your choice of date/time.