Yesterday I was in mid text chat with someone and my phone stopped sending messages…then  my oldest away at college in Chicago called me up freaking out that he couldn’t text at all and could only call occasionally…then number two son descended on me with similar symptoms. Clearly something bad had happened. I tried T-Mobile support and couldn’t get through, the on-line help first couldn’t then crashed. Being the online kind a guy I am I leapt to both Google News and Twitter and sure enough there was a press release just 23 minutes old about an outage problem which exactly matched the symptoms so I was able to reassure my panicking offspring that the problem was only temporary and they should calm the heck down and stop texting whilst “studying.”    Of the two solutions Google was easier to understand as I didn’t have to study the runes of popular topics on Twitter, but both point to the continued rise of news search and real time search where content  indexed only minutes or seconds ago will show up in search results. It’s a neat trick and getting more real time all the time.

Word is that our friends at Yahoo are about to release a new real-time search which will be integrated with their current main search, it will feature all kinds of social and ‘buzz’ stuff…not 100% sure how it will look but sounds cool.

Meantime in  a related story our good friends Google who have just about a perfect monopoly (90%) of European search are getting in hot water with the EU powers that be potentially landing them in some antitrust doo-doo. A group of what sounds a lot like Fraidy Cat Italian newspapers are bringing a case against Google for excluding them from the search results because they had refused to join the Google News consortium. It sounds a lot like sour grapes (albeit nicely fermented into a fine Chianti) but if it develops into a fight and Google looses the already fairly weird European search space will get even more crazy.  Oh La La! We’ll keep you posted.