MySpace Status Updates Now Live in Google Real-Time Search

Google came a little late to the real-time web party, just like any of the mainstream search engines, but it is now firing on all cylinders and real-time results often pop-up mingled with the regular ones. Google scrapes several sources for the real-time data, Twitter, Yahoo Answers and many others, and now it has added another one to the list: MySpace. The move has been known for a couple of months but MySpace status updates are now finally making their way into Google real-time results.

"In December, Google announced plans to implement the MySpace Real-Time Search API, which would push publicly available updates from our users to Google in real-time," Mike Jones, MySpace Co-President, wrote.

"Beginning today, when you search for anything on Google, as part of your search results you will see live updates from MySpace users, including news, photos, and blog posts that they have chosen to publically publish," he added. "Further, all of these updates will be ranked to reflect the freshest, most relevant results, making it easier to find the latest information on anything you're searching for on Google, including the music and artists you enjoy most."

MySpace has been trying to open up more and has announced its real-time Stream API in December just after Google launched the real-time search feature. In fact, the social network was one of the sources touted by Google at launch but it took it another two months to actually implement support. MySpace users make about one billion status updates per month, about the same as the number of monthly tweets, but these are generally less focused on current events or sharing links than those on Twitter.

Google made the move to integrate real-time results late last year after Twitter had proven that there was a great need for access to the most recent information. With the MySpace addition, Google's sources for real-time data are pretty varied but there is one, rather big, caveat, Facebook data, which still isn't live, limited to groups, pages and celebrities.