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.

Last week I put "W1F 0TF" into trusty ol' Google Maps and found my way to the Slug & Lettuce on Wardour Street for Chinwag Live's 'Search is Dead, Long Live Search' event. Examining some of the key challenges currently facing search engines, and what these may mean for brands, web companies (not least SEO agencies) and users in general, the lively panel discussion helped crystallise some ideas I've been pondering in recent times.

Just as the ferocious 'Browser Wars' continue to rage, the fight for search engine dominance remains in full force. In the West we are so familiar with you-know-who that the word 'Googled' is poised to become the 21st Century 'hoover' and lose its capitalisation, so we'd be forgiven for thinking the battle effectively ended some time ago. But step away from the primary colours; the story isn't so simple. First, look to the Far East where the landscape is remarkably different - Baidu holds a mountainous 69% in China, while Google has only a hilly 25% (July 2009). Second, stop thinking about search purely in terms of the 'traditional' search engines, since these now represent only one of many powerful ways to discover content, and the picture is less clear.