Find Updates from People’s Plus Stream: Google Realtime Alternative

Google Realtime Search, was once a very useful tool to find the latest tweets from users from the Google search interface. Personally, it helped me confirm breaking news, downtime of some popular sites etc. But it went down after soon after Google’s deal with Twitter for access to the public tweets/updates ended. 

The realtime search option has disappeared from the search results sidebar, and the standalonegoogle.com/realtime product returns a 404 error page ~via Mashable.

Although, Google is planning to implement the public stream of updates of people in Google+ into the realtime search, but that’s not until the public release of Google+ itself. But here is a temporary solution.

Search for Recent Updates from Google+ Stream, Facebook Status

Google actually indexes the status updates someone posts on his/ her Google+ public stream. It seems to me that it works with Facebook status updates as well. Use Google’s site specific search for the Past hour or Past 24 hours to see what people are talking about any topic of your choice.

Use site:facebook.com and site:plus.google.com with any search term, topic etc to updates from people about it. Click "Show search tools" to show results from specific time range likePast hour or Past 24 hours etc.

This is an useful solution for someone looking for an alternative to find latest updates from social media sites. Unfortunately, twitter doesn’t let Google index people’s tweets. Hence you can’t use this method to find "almost" real-time updates posted by people on their twitter timeline.