I'm slow, so I only just noticed Google implemented a realtime search a few months ago, hehe: http://www.google.com/realtime

http://www.google.com/landing/realtime/ - Seems primarily to turn up Twitter results, but that's not bad if you can use the usual Google filters to tweak the search.

I previously mentioned this search engine, because it's better than Twitter's built-in function: http://www.taylordigital.com/twittersearch

Anyway, just though I'd mention in case someone missed it. Possible uses mentioned here:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=6873
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=6836

Edit: I see the timeline gleans good results. Options like updates with images, geography, and full conversation look useful.

If you haven't noticed already, Google Realtime is down (redirects to google.com). Looks like it might be up and connected to Google+ in the future: http://mashable.com/2011/07/04/google-re...suspended/

Could end up better in the long run, perhaps.

At any rate, as a replacement, Yahoo Japan apparently has recently made a ‘strategic alliance’ with Twitter: http://journal.mycom.co.jp/news/2011/06/...index.html (via Asiajin)

Here's the Yahoo Japan Realtime Search: http://realtime.search.yahoo.co.jp

There's also Topsy and Bing Social, as recent articles have noted, but Yahoo Japan seems best, at least for Japanese.

Frankly, as I discovered after TaylorDigital's engine went down, Twitter's search has been working well for me in Japanese lately, so I'm not sure how much it matters now. I'll have to experiment with exact phrase searches, which used to not work well for Twitter's native search in Japanese. (Also seems that Yahoo's front end emphasizes keyword features.)

Bonus, also from Asiajin: http://trendwall.proto.jp/

And I've already linked http://togetter.com/ before...

Edit: A little testing tells me that Twitter is more precise with the exact phrases now, but ironically I sort of prefer how Yahoo Japan's Realtime shows results of different conjugations of the same constructions...