Oct 25, 2010 15:33 GMT  ·  By

Google has a simple development philosophy, release early, release often. This means that updates come constantly, but they are usually not big enough to get much notice or a dedicated announcement. When it comes to the search engine, Google provides weekly round-ups of the notable updates.

One of the changes introduced last week is a realtime counter in search results. For queries which relate to current events, a counter will be displayed below the news section to indicate if there are any realtime results from Twitter, Facebook and so on.

Clicking on the link will enable users to see the realtime results for that particular topic.

"Now, when people on your favorite social networks are commenting on a particular topic you’ve searched for, you can easily see how many updates have been shared, all in real-time. This makes it easy to see when a news story is popular on the social web," Google explained.

Google Autocomplete, formerly known as Suggest, has been expanded. While the feature had been introduced to localized versions of Google Search, the company is now implementing hyper-local search results for every country where the feature is available.

"More recently, we took these tailored predictions to a new level in the U.S. by targeting to specific metro areas like San Francisco and Chicago. This week, we extended these hyper-local predictions around the globe to every country that has Autocomplete," Google explained.

In practice, it means that queries in your particular language will return suggestions based on the popular searches in the area near you. This should make them more relevant for your city, particularly useful for local searches.

Finally, Google has also updated Google Alerts, an email notification tool it's been offering since 2003. It enables users to keep up with the topics that interest them via email.

For those who used it for more generalist topics, like 'news' or 'finance,' Google now includes News sections in the email, directing users to the right section of the site.