Like you, I too have seen all the Twitter integrations into blogs, Wave bots, and every other feed type app out there. So what is so special about Google adding a new real-time view tied to their search results if most of the results just seem to be user tweets?
Well, for starters, this is simply an additional step Google is taking into an ongoing effort of making as much of the web searchable in as near real-time as possible. The Google spider bot is continuously integrating new web content into their search index several times a day and is sorting through the some trillion pages out there on the Interweb as efficiently as it can. Obvious priority sources for adding new content have been Google’s News search sites, videos, and the major Blog sites they monitor (go figure that web content that updates more regularly should get indexed more often to show newer information faster in search results). So this is really just a continuation of their prioritization efforts in determining which sites are more worthy of more frequent crawls. And I think it’s an obvious choice to be focusing on partnering with Twitter and the other handful of popular social media sites.
From the Google Blog:
“Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we’re announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.”
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/relevance-meets-real-time-web.html
While there are handy tools out there for getting a pulse on what’s happening in the Twittersphere (HootSuite is my current fav), that is still only a tiny portion of the traffic on the web. So, how much more powerful are your Google Alerts going to be once Google has all the major social networking sites being instantly and continuously crawled for new content? As a truly ninja Sales Manager, Social Media Guru, or business owner, wouldn’t you want to be notified the instant anyone anywhere on the Net said something relating to your products/services or target market? I know I would.
Also, what happens once they can add to that all the public Waves that are going to soon be coming? It’s literally going to be a tidal Wave (sorry, couldn’t help myself ) of new noise and we’re all going to be thanking (or running and hiding from) Google for keeping things organized. If one considers Google Wave as a partial replacement to IM/email and combined with the growing trend in microblogging, then expect to see a surge of new traffic on the web for Google (and others) to index, as publishing web content becomes just as natural as writing quick emails or IM’ing your friends.
Coming next will be my thoughts on Google using Wave to further their quest for world dominance… er, I mean “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” 
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