The search engine landscape is hotting up! Although Google is still the dominant search engine (according to market research firm Hitwise, Google accounted for more than 87% of the UK search market in 2008), in recent months, the search engine market has gotten just that little bit busier.

With several new acquisitions, partnerships and enhancements coming out over the last few weeks Google is facing some stiff competition.

• Microsoft’s Bing was launched back in June and appears to be having a good crack at Google’s dominance, delivering fast search results. A lot of our clients are seeing an increasing amount of traffic come via Bing.
• Wolfram Alpha entered the search market place with its "computational knowledge engine"
• and a revamped Ask Jeeves have also entered the fray

Real-time Search Results

The big noise at the moment is all about "real-time search" and the ability of search engines to rapidly index the very latest content on the web and make it available via their search tools.

Google have had their Web Options tool as part of the standard search engine for some time now and it kind of gave an idea where things might be heading.

Today, we caught first sight if their new search tool which is their "first step in improving the speed, accuracy and comprehensiveness of search results".

Nicknamed "Caffeine", the beta search tool is able to carry out searches at double the existing speed and also introduces real-time results and news feeds.

So what does Real-time Search mean to most everyday users?

Well probably not a lot.

Most of us won’t even notice a difference, the search interface hasn’t change it is simply the algorithms being used to display the results.

But with Caffeine picking up news stories and putting fresher content higher up the search results, there has never been a more important time to keep your website content up to date and perhaps even think about adding a blog to your online presence.