The blogosphere has been buzzing this week following Google’s unveiling of its real-time search. The new feature adds a stream of up-to-the-second search results from Twitter updates, freshly published webpages and blogs as well as status updates from social networking sites including Facebook, MySpace and FriendFeed.

Search for “Rihanna,” for example, and halfway down the page of regular results — below the music results, the top three or so main Rihanna web destinations (official site, Wikipedia and MySpace music page) and the news headlines — there’s a box labeled “Latest results” that scrolls with updates.

Click through and you’ll get an entire page of constantly updating results.

This is similar to what Microsoft search engine Bing has been doing with its Twitter search but, obviously, Google pulls results from all over (still mostly Twitter, it seems).

However, unlike with Bing, which pulls results for any random search (not to mention plain-old Twitter search), real-time results on Google only pop up if you’re searching for something popular.

The feature seems to be in a nascent, highly hit-or-miss stage, but it will doubtless grow. The demand, after all, is huge — not just for up-to-the-minute information in general but also for ways of navigating the ever-growing, constantly fluctuating social web, which often contains more relevant, useful information, anyway.

It’s what people are talking about now. You can have the most beautifully designed website in the universe, the sharpest sales team, the sweetest location downtown … but what are they saying about you on social media? That, everyone will know about.

Further reading: “The Real-Time Web and its Future” on ReadWriteWeb