Google the undeniable leader in search has just taken the search engine wars up a notch. From initially crawling the web once a month for updates, then every few seconds, to now providing real-time search updates from live news feeds on social sites like Twitter and Facebook, Google is on its way towards delivering information at the speed of light. Google’s “Relevancy Expert” Amit Singhal explained that Google has come up with an algorithm which considers query fluctuation, language modeling, quality of the author, semantics, query hotness, topicality and real-time URL resolution. Searchers can select real-time search on their mobile phone as well as take advantage of the “hot topic” feature. So, if eyeballs were straying to Twitter and Bing they are now firmly back on Google. The lines between SEO and social media have blurred a little too. It will be interesting to see if negative Tweets, for example, could affect click thru rates on Ad Words and hence have a broader affect on organic rankings.