Google despite the bad press recently has pushed out a new Google Plus update that introduced two new features to the site.

Hashtags, known from Twitter, are now supported by Google+. A hashtag is basically the symbol # followed by a keyword. Twitter uses these for categorization and search, and the same principle has been ported by the Google engineers to Google+.

Hashtags are automatically turned into links in posts that link to the keywords search results on Google Plus.

It is used both for categorizing and searching on the site. Hashtags are completely optional, and even if you do not use hashtags your posts may appear in hashtag search results.

The second new feature is real-time search which is now available on Google Plus as well.

Real-time search will tell you during searches if new posts are available. If you click on the message or select the “most recent” button (instead of the default best of button) you will notice that new posts will appear automatically on top.

Google displays a Pause button then to give users an option to pause the auto-updating which can be helpful for very busy topics.

Real-time search can be handy during events like press conferences where news are posted continuously.

Here is a video showing Vic Gundotra demonstrating both new features on Google Plus.

When you look at the hashtag feature you will notice that Google displays keyword related posts on the search results page and not only posts that have been tagged with a hashtag. Depending on the quality of the search results it could lead to the inclusion of unrelated posts in the search results.

Hashtags and real-time search, what’s your take on this two new features of Google+?

Rae Hoffmann recently investigated the issue further and came to the conclusion that the real-time search results can not only be used to spam the search results with advertisement but also for scarier things like becoming dangerous for children.

Spam can be added in the form of links which seem to go through sometimes and other times do not, phone numbers, clickable Twitter hash tags and other information that can be added to those messages. Rae managed to place a real-time message in the Viagra search results which were placed by Google just below the news and before any regular search engine content.

Real-time libel was another aspect that Rae investigated. Think of a Twitter account that is at the same time a company name or person. Anyone who tweets about that name can place that tweet in the search engine results for that name.

The most dangerous aspect of it all is the danger to children as it becomes possible to place messages in the search results that call for action. She gave one example where someone could place a message in Sesame Street search results that would tell search engine visitors to call a specific number to chat about the show.

All of those scenarios and many more that are possible are scary and Google needs to find a way to deal with those problems.

Those results are very much added like the other additions that Google has added to the search results over the year including Images, videos or Google News stories. They appear as Latest results for search term in the search engine results.

The new entries are on the other hand slightly different from previous additions with text scrolling the most notable difference. A scrollbar is also provided to scroll those results as well as a pause button to stop the automatic updating.

The realtime search results – like other Google additions to the search results – can appear anywhere in the results from the very top to the bottom.

Most users probably will not have the chance to access them by performing searches in Google. There is however a way. Mashable notes that the Hot Topics in Google Trends are linking to search results pages that contain realtime results.

Google has released a demonstration video about their real-time search addition to Google Search.

Google has not provided any information yet on the source selection process. The real-time entries are made up of various sources including Twitter messages but also news articles and Yahoo Answers. This could open the door for all sorts of manipulation.

I personally do not like this new addition and think that it does not add a lot of value to the search results. It makes them even harder to access and I would really like an option to turn off those features that I do not want in the search results.

What’s your opinion on the latest addition to Google Search?

Twitter on the other hand adds another dimension to search. Not to every search but to specific search terms that are time related. Think for instance about news of plane crashes, earthquakes and other disasters and basically anything that benefits from real time observations.

Bing has already included Twitter in their search engine. The subpage of Bing displays popular topics on Twitter by default.

A search or a click on a popular tag will display the latest tweets and top links shared by Twitter users about the selected topic.

Google on the other hand has just announced that they will be adding Twitter results to their search engine as well in the coming months. According to the announcement only search terms that can benefit from real time observations.

The main question that neither Microsoft nor Google are addressing at the moment is how the quality of the content is evaluated. Since the content is displayed more or less in real time there is no time for a manual control of the content. How are they going to differentiate between good and bad – true or false – content.

What’s your take on the development?

None of them can be considered real-time search results. Ran Geva posted an interesting article over at the Omgili blog which described a way to change the search parameters further to come close to real-time search results in Google. The default Google search result urls contain the qdr:x parameter if the results are filtered by time with x being replaced by d for days, we for weeks, m for months and y for years.

All he did was to replace the x value with n for minutes and s for seconds to get results that have been posted in the last 60 minutes or 60 seconds. It is furthermore possible to add a number behind the n or s value to customize the query further. The parameter qdr:n20 would search for results that have been indexed in the last 20 minutes.

The custom search parameter will be displayed as past minute or past second after performing the search and will persist even when conducing new Google searches. Seconds usually do not yield many results (if any at all) while minutes are usually well indexed already.

Steve Rubel acted quickly and created a bookmarklet to display the Google search results that have been indexed in the last ten minutes.

The bookmarklet can be changed easily to search a different time frame. All that needs to be done is to change the qdr=n10 part in the bookmarklet.