Google real-time search is officially live, on its own standalone sight. A project first introduced late last year, the real-time search initiative has since taken on a whole new meaning for Google and the search and advertising industry.

Real-time search, as a movement, has shaped greatly shaped how social media becomes relevant to many other industries, regardless of their previous level of marketing strength. Democratizing information all over again, many businesses and brands are taking advantage of all the access now up for grabs.

While Google is pushing out a lot of new tools and features to stave off competition, this new democratizing effect is enabling a lot of startups to make their way into the heart of real-time search. Other major platforms, like Microsoft and Yahoo, are anxious to improve the relevance of their search methods as well.

Google lists the new features (instructional video below):

On the new homepage you’ll find some great tools to help you refine and understand your results. First, you can use geographic refinements to find updates and news near you, or in a region you specify. So if you’re traveling to Los Angeles this summer, you can check out tweets from Angelenos to get ideas for activities happening right where you are.

In addition, we’ve added a conversations view, making it easy to follow a discussion on the real-time web. Often a single tweet sparks a larger conversation of re-tweets and other replies, but to put it together you have to click through a bunch of links and figure it out yourself. With the new “full conversation” feature, you can browse the entire conversation in a single glance. We organize the tweets from oldest to newest and indent so you quickly see how the conversation developed.

Finally, we’ve also added updates content to Google Alerts, making it easy to stay informed about a topic of your choosing. Now you can create an alert specifically for “updates” to get an email the moment your topic appears on Twitter or other short-form services. Or, if you want to manage your email volume, you can set alerts to email you once per day or week.