WebProWorld

Real-time search is, appropriately enough, going to become quite visible very soon.  Google announced today that it’s rolling out real-time features, and the comprehensiveness of this effort is almost unprecedented as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are all onboard.

Google’s list of partners doesn’t stop there; FriendFeed, Identi.ca, and Jaiku are also cooperating.  Plus, standard blogs, news sites, and other Google properties (like YouTube) are contributing to the stream of information that’ll become available following a standard search.

Google’s share of the search market inched up by 1 percent in November accounting for 71.57 percent of all U.S. searches conducted during the month, according to Hitwise.

Yahoo trailed landing in the second position with 15.39 percent of the search share representing a 5 percent decline from October. Bing also saw a dip of 2 percent and ended up with 9.34 percent of the search market.

Ask saw its search share rise 1 percent to 2.65 percent in November.

DVR and online video continue to show considerable growth in the U.S., up 21.1% and 34.9 percent respectively, in time spent in the third quarter of 2009, according Nielsen’s latest Three Screen Report.

In Q3, the average American watched 31 hours of TV per week, with 31 minutes spending playback mode with their DVR.

In addition, each week the average consumer spent 4 hours on the Internet and 22 minutes watching online video.

Twitter announced that it will be opening up its data stream (otherwise known as the Firehose) in early 2010. This means the number of Twitter apps will skyrocket, and the potential for functionality in existing Twitter apps will be greatly increased. That means good things for developers, and most likely great things for Twitter.

Facebook is rolling out new features today to allow users to have more control over how they share content with others.

Users will be able to control who sees each individual piece of content they post. Facebook’s new Publisher Privacy Control will allow people to select a privacy setting for every post they make at the time they create it. By making selections in a drop-down menu, users will be able to control what they want to share with friends, family and co-workers.

Google announced that is now including Google Groups in the Premier and Education editions of Google Apps. The company says Groups is one of its most widely-used applications, so it only makes sense.

When a group is set up, employees/students can share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, shared folders, sites, calendars, and videos with the group, rather than having to include individual email addresses or try to remember who joined or left a certain group.

In Google Docs, there is a new sort-by-relevance feature for search results. When you search in Google Docs, your results will be organized by relevance, rather than "last modified date", which has been the way of the past. There is a menu on the right side of the toolbar that lets you decide how you want your results sorted.