Am I the only one that sees the fundamental flaw with real-time search?  Basically, as soon as data is presented in real-time, it is no longer real-time data.  Real-time is not a tangible thing.  It’s an event.  Hence, you can push content in real-time (like a real time news feed).  However, you cannot pull real-time data (since, as soon as that information is indexed and disseminated, it’s no longer real-time).

This may just be semantics but I think all of this sudden interest in real-time data is misplaced.  I might be stating the obvious here but real-time data has nothing to do with time.  It’s about published static content vs. conversational dynamic content.  Whereas Google search is about information created by humans, real-time search is about human thought.

Umm…so what?  Well, conversations aren’t just happening in Twitter.  Think of all of the chats, forum discussions and blog comments that are permeating from every orifice of the internet.  If you could aggregate and somehow filter all of those thoughts into easily consumable thoughtlets, well that would be like having a search engine for the internet’s stream-of-consciousness.  We’ll call it…The Matrix.