At its annual search event today, Google has announced real-time search results.

It's a substantial step forward in search technology, reducing significantly any delay in minutes between content creation and distribution across the engine.

The search engine has also formalized deals with Facebook and MySpace for public content streams, meaning the pipeline just widened (and perhaps got a lot less rarified).

A YouTube video demo of the new search is attached.

Google announced today its impending development of "next-generation architecture" for its world-leading search engine.

"For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions," two Google engineers write on the development blog.

It is inviting people to test-drive the engine and provide feedback on the results. To do so requires comparing results here on the new version and there on the existing version in crawling, indexing and ranking.

The implications are significant in Google's efforts to continue to pave the way in linking content to advertising.