The Real-Time Web is arriving on the major search engines, with Google and Yahoo both displaying real-time results on relevant searches. But don't think Bing is going to be left sitting out in the cold. After signing a deal with Twitter and Facebook, they've been quietly testing their own full-fledged Twitter search engine.
Google's approach is to provide smart results, with only certain search strings producing relevant tweets. For example, searching on 'Tiger Woods' will produce a scrolling real-time box with results that range from tweets to recent news items on the subject. However, more specific searches such as a search for the 'best websites of the decade' will not produce the real-time results.
Yahoo's implementation is a bit more flat. Rather than displaying the information in real-time, Yahoo simply shows relevant tweets in a box that is non-descript compared to the other search results.
Certainly, Google's results offer the most bang for the buck, but I can't help but think Google is becoming a bit too cluttered. Between news results, image results, video results and now real-time results, most of the first page is now being taken up by these special search results. Perhaps a better implementation would be to show the real-time results in the same right-hand column as the sponsored links, thus allowing for a bit better economy of space.