Google got a little outflanked when the whole “real time” thing started becoming big. It's the theme of the year in tech terms. But Twitter is stealing all the limelight, real time is all about the microblogging platform. Google even admitted to this several months back. But don't mistake this for giving up or backing down. A trick put forward by the search startup Omgili's CEO Ran Geva, which enables users to limit their Google searches to the past minute, even the past second, hints at more fundamental changes underneath the surface.

The trick itself is a simple URL hack that manipulates the time frame for the searches with more flexibility than that allowed by the regular GUI. When a query is made using one of the date filters available in the new options bar, the “tbs =qdr” argument is added, where Ran figures 'qdr' stand for query date range.

For example, when looking at results for the past two days, it would be “tbs =qdr:d2,” where 'd' stands for days. But replace the 'd' with an 'n' and you're now seeing the results for the past two minutes. Replace it with an 's' and you'll get the results for the past two seconds. 'N' stands for minutes presumably because 'm' was used for months.

The actual syntax is tbs=qdr:[name][value] and the name can be replaced by y (year), m (month), w (week), d (day), h (hour), n (minute) and s (second) and the value is a number. Experimenting with very short time ranges can wield varied results, which is likely why the feature hasn't been enabled or officially introduced by Google yet.

But being able to focus your search on very recent results isn't actually of any help, if there aren't any results to return. Luckily, Google has been working hard to increase its indexing speed towards real-time results. While it hasn't made any sort of official announcement, purely empirical, there is a much greater emphasis on the real time, with recent results given a much bigger relevance. And, with a new architecture just around the corner, it may become significantly faster.

Interestingly, it actually manages to beat Twitter for several queries already, but, for actual, ongoing events, Twitter really shines, with maybe hundreds of results per minute, whereas Google manages to return only a few. Then again, are that many tweets in a such short amount of time relevant or useful to anyone?