One of the most competitive spaces these days seems to be real time information on the Web. Twitter came on the scene and was able to do wonders with real time searching. Breaking stories were found through this new phenomen of "tweeting" and searching via hashtags (#) , so trending topics take higher rank in search results. The other big boys couldn't sit back and watch though...it was only a matter of time before they jumped in on the real time search results action.
Facebook now offers real time search as well. Facebook allows you to search through status updates, shared media, and pages you follow. It also offers a tabbed approach to look through different categories of search (similar to images, documents, etc on Google). Users also have the ability to share updates with "Everyone" instead of just friends. Could there be any potential in being able to search friends of friend's posts? This would allow a much larger audience to be apart of the action, but who knows.
Google also has a new version that is testing now called Caffeine. It is supposed to be more real time search tool as well. Google's plan is to have Caffeine be faster, more accurate, and return more results.
Read more to find out some of the not so well known players that have jumped on the real time search bandwagon over the past few months. There is a brief description of the service with a few of my notes from visiting/testing each of the search engines. "Charles Gibson" was the main search phrase used, as he was recently replaced by Diane Sawyer, so results are reflective of that search.