It seems like only days ago that I was writing a post about search engines and social recommendation, and that's because it was only days ago. Since then - decades in internet time - some interesting developments have taken place.

The hype around real-time search, particularly focussed on everyone's favourite micro-blogging service, has certainly caused the major search engines to take note. The power of real-time data, most obviously encapsulated in Twitter's trending topics, seems to prove itself weekly (or, if you like, instantly).

At the core of my previous post was the inclination that, despite the hype, major search engines and services like Twitter have entirely different missions - and they know it. Both the widespread creation of real-time data, and appetite for its consumption, are relatively recent phenomena. If this information is being created, and is valuable, Google will work to index it as part of its mission to organise the world's information. Indexing tweets is one important step towards this, and... hey look they announced it. As did Bing, Microsoft's new search engine. The latter seems to have rushed out a rather confusing solution, the big G is taking its time, and I for one will be watching carefully to see how they roll this out without disrupting their archetypal search results page and carefully honed user experience.

But wait, there's more. Discussion in the comments of my previous post touched upon the possible ways Google could introduce social components or 'filters' - social, that is, beyond my point that the Google machine has fundamentally always been social, since the web itself is social. As people take greater control of their networks, and discover more and more content through social recommendation instead of search, how can search evolve? Google Social Search is a new experimental product, announced this week, which seems to be a first stab at that very significant challenge. The idea is that you create a public Google profile, and add your sites to it (such as your Twitter page). It will then bring results to search queries from (but not limited to) content published by your wider social network, including your Gmail contacts, people you follow on FriendFeed, and more.

Such experiments bubble up from the Googleplex quite often, and frequently don't reach the surface; but the intention to add a social nuance to personalised search clearly exists. Search just got a little friendlier.