The real-time web is definitely the future and the future is now. Twitter.com and Facebook.com are already considered part of the real-time web. Not just because you can update your profile, but because people update their Facebook.com stuff many times a day. It is a moving target. Facebook, with it’s millions of users, is changing every second. That’s real-time. Twitter.com is designed and build as a real-time tool. If you follow enough people, your twitter.com home page will constantly update as you read it. It is a living page.

Google.com recently announced their new infrastructure, Google Wave, where email, web pages, and instant messages all converge in a way that makes websites, photo albums, and conversations all work in a real-time way. It is hard to explain all that will come from this, but the impact is huge. Web pages are becoming living documents.

For the average surfer, what this means is that interacting with websites is on the rise. Surfers will be adding comments, asking questions, uploading photos, and just generally interacting with you on your website. Not in email, but literally on your website.

The problem with the real-time web is real-time search. Google.com can take days to weeks to update their index after you update your website. If your website is updating every five minutes, how can Google.com keep up? It can’t!

Microsoft sees this as an opportunity to compete in the search engine market by adding some real-time search to their new search engine, Bing.com. Bing.com indexes selected popular twitterers and includes those results real-time. They only monitor a few popular twitterers, but it shows us what they are trying to do. They are trying to implement real-time search.

Real-time search is a real-time problem. The mission of the search engines is to show you high quality and timely results for your searches. But how can the search engines determine what is high quality and useful information in real-time? Right now they can’t.

For standard search engine results, there are a number of ways to assess the quality of your site’s content. How many people link to it, for example. But in real-time it is nearly impossible for the search engines to separate breaking news from pointless dribble.

The race is on for this technology. The technical solution for websites to have their data indexed in real-time is in place. Websites will feed the information directly to the search engines via instant messaging style frameworks. That’s the easy part. All you need is bandwidth. But sorting this data out and prioritizing it is another story.

Expect to see a thumbs-up and thumbs-down types of systems and other experimental methods. They all have weaknesses. I do not look forward to the early days of all this.

Imagine searching Google.com or Bing.com for a great Italian Restaurant. Normal web pages will be mixed in with a bunch of chatter. How much of that chatter will be useful? Virtually none of it. Then imagine searching for late breaking news like the recent death of Michael Jackson. You want all the chatter because normal web pages did not have the scoop nearly as quickly as did Twitter.com and Facebook.com. But even there, will that chatter be about the news you are search for or will it be all the crude jokes that started nearly as quickly as the breaking news? Do you want the news or do you want the jokes? What will the search engines show you? How will they sort it out? Will they give you choices?

Assessing all of this in real-time and producing quality results is going to be a real challenge and that is the essence of the new search engine wars. Some people are giving Microsoft’s Bing.com credit for breaking into the real-time search first and are cautioning Google.com to watch out. I disagree. I know what Google.com is doing with Google Wave and I see a much brighter future for Google.com. I have not heard anything about Yahoo.com and my guess is that they will be the last to move towards this. I don’t think Yahoo.com has been aggressive enough and that’s why Google.com displaced Yahoo.com way back when. I doubt that will change now. Sell your Yahoo.com stock and buy Google.com stock.

The application of all this to your business is huge. You should examine adding real-time features to your website, the impact of real-time search on your search engine positioning, and so much more. Especially if you have the need for fast product releases and want a viral buzz about your product. For now, begin working your twitter.com and facebook.com accounts and start blogging. Keep your content related to your products and services. When Google Wave is released, jump on it quickly. Start doing the real-time thing and let the search engines do the rest.