(photo credit Michel Filion)

Relevant Results blog, part of the CNET News site, have posted a thorough and engaging piece on the current state of the real-time Web.

It is interesting to see how the major search engines are filtering real-time results, determining what is relevant and when real-time search becomes important. As summed up by Tom Krazit on Relevant Results:

The major search players have the luxury of comparing spikes in their search query logs with spikes in certain topics from the feeds they receive from real-time information sources like Twitter. When activity around the same topic is spiking on both search query traffic and real-time publishing platforms, the search companies know something is happening.

Moving from here, the point when a significant event is happening, to deciding which post, Tweets and news articles are most pertinent is the real trick of real-time. As the search engines get to grips with relevancy in this respect, it is clear that a myriad of factors from quality of Followers to semantic estimates will need to be taken into consideration.

With Bing, Google, and Yahoo all throwing their weight behind real-time search, doing deals with the various platforms, then we can expect to see our search results evolve over time:

So if search engines are to remain relevant themselves, they’ll need to make sense of this content. And unless social-media networks are able to make their content discoverable, they won’t turn into the types of content-discovery engines that their public-relations people like to imagine are already here.

For a wider picture on the state of real-time, we recommend you check out the full article here and let us know you thoughts in the comments below.

The entire forty five interview can been seen below, which Schmidt touches upon a number of topics from the forthcoming Chrome OS to the future of super-fast broadband, but our interest was piqued by the discussion on the Real-time search and social media.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHxub_yQfig]

Schmidt discusses the value of real-time information sources, which is more than just Twitter and Facebook, with the big challenge not being a question of indexing this data but how to rank and sort it. As we see such a huge increase in social media content it changes the way people consume information and Schmidt believes that “the great challenge of the age” is learning how to rank it all.

Do you think Google is up to the challenge or have Bing stolen a march on the Mountain View giant here?