Today's events in Libya show potential of Google+ real-time search

Events of historical significance like the killing of Osama bin Laden in May, and most recently the murder of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, show the importance of real-time search and retrieval of news.

While Twitter has arguably played the most important role in breaking many pivotal news stories over the past few years, it may now have a worthy competitor in Google+.

Although Google announced real-time search and intelligent hash-tags last week, significant news events as witnessed in Libya today demonstrate its true potential. Google’s real-time search works much the same as Twitter’s, but with one distinct advantage; rich-media content.

Try this search for ‘gaddafi‘, then click Most recent. Within a few seconds new content will appear asynchronously as it is posted to Google+. A word of warning though, some of the images appearing are needlessly graphic.

A Pause button stops the stream from automatically updating and pushing older content down the page.

If Google release their API and developers accept it, and if the network continues to grow its user-base as it has done, Google+ could become another great platform for emerging news content.