When we first introduced our real-time search features last December, we focused on bringing relevance to the freshest information on the web. Our goal was to provide real-time content from a comprehensive set of sources, integrated right into your usual search results. Today we’re making our most significant enhancements to date, giving real-time information its own home and more powerful tools to help you find what you need. Now you can access Google Realtime Search at its own address, www.google.com/realtime (the page is rolling out now and should be available soon. Use this link if you want to try out the new features right away).

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.

If you read the tech news, you certainly saw today's reports of a announced deal between Google and Verizon over net neutrality. The two companies outlined the "proposal" on their own website, and it basically looks like exactly what was discussed last week, despite vehement (and, at times, mocking) denials by the CEOs of both companies about last week's reports. This isn't a "deal," so much as a "proposal," and by "proposal," they seem to mean "vague assertions that don't mean much." The crux of it seems to be that Google and Verizon agree that traffic shouldn't be tiered on your everyday internet, but it's fine on some new not-really-the-internet network, as well as wireless networks (where much of the world is moving anyway). It's not hard to see how this is really about leaving lots of loopholes open for both companies, but I'm still trying to figure out if this announcement means anything. It's a framework for the FCC, but it's not clear that the FCC will use it or should use it. Even if they do, I keep reading through it to find out what's different from the way things are now, and I can't find anything. It seems to be a proposal that says "here's the way things already stand" in new language. So, frankly, I can't see reasons to be upset or happy about this, because it's not saying much of anything.