Google = Old School
Tweetmeme, OneRiot, Topsy, Scoopler and Collecta = new school of REAL TIME search

Google determines website relevance by backlinking [how many sites are linking to them], how fast it grows:

• Overnight – sign of spamming
• Slow and organically – sign of quality and legitimacy

However, as was the case with Micheal Jackson’s death, where millions of people googled him on google news – google suspected a malware attack and blocked people searching for MJ.

These kind of right now news/search inquiries or ‘trending topics‘ are on the rise.

Most of these new search engines rely on Twitter. Ruling out possible spam, these engines analyze tweets to determine what’s Hot.

The biggest difference is that on old school search engines, Google, Yahoo, etc, the results are slow to change, whereas on these new Real-Time search engines, results change constantly.

So how does this affect your marketing tactics? If you are in it for the long haul, you still need to focus on Google.

If you have something short lived and in need of immediate attention/action, then you might want to focus on Tweeting/Retweeting.

**UPDATE** December 11, 2009

Apparently, Google is not one to let any sort of SEARCH pass them by and they are now offering their own REAL TIME search feature.

They call it GOOGLE TRENDS.