The real-time web has really taken off over the last year, and with Twitter showing a 10-fold increase in UK traffic in 2008, it shows no signs of slowing down in the next 12 months. So what is the real-time web exactly? With the huge number of blogging and microblogging services on the web, it allows even for the most basic user to update the world with what they're up to. While this is a great way to keep in touch with friends, it's also an even better way of being updated, in real-time, with the latest news and events from around the world. Basically, the real-time web is what is being talked about right now, right this second.

This poses a problem for Google Search, which is increasingly being shown up as just a historical web index, as user-generated posts from 10 seconds ago won't appear in Google until tomorrow. (I use the word just being relative to the subject, what Google does for indexing the historical web is incredible in its own right.)

This was brought in to focus recently with the plane crash over the Hudson River in New York. Twitter was flooded with user updates from the scene filled with comments, photos and mobile videos. These could all be seen within seconds of being posted by combining all the feeds together. Pretty smart.

 The problem is that, in cases like the Hudson River crash, Google could never keep up with the number of updates being posted every second the way Twitter itself can deliver the content to you. Could you imagine what the news would have been like if we had this during 9/11 or the JFK assasination?

Google's strength comes from the fact that if I now wanted to look up the Hudson River crash, 11 days after the incident, then Twitter wouldn't be the best place to look. It's just a shame for Google that most of the search traffic for the incident would've happened within hours of the incident itself.

So what does Google have to do to dominate this kind of activity? Working closer with Twitter (or just buying them out, in true Google fashion!) to provide a better real-time search engine would be enough. Twitter's search function at the moment runs rings around Google for real-time results as it can show you content that is only seconds old. It even alerts you to new items that have been posted since you submitted your search query, which would be a cool idea for Google to try out.

Another amazing feature Twitter's search function has is limiting results to a specific radius of a location. Which means you could build yourself a real-time news feed for user comments, photos and videos of an event that may be happening in your city, or even your street.

Will we see a dedicated real-time search engine from Google this year? I certainly hope so, but hold no expectations after their Blog search never really hit it off.