Our friends over at Sitewire have a really great article on how the deals between Facebook, Twitter and Google are going to change the way your site is indexed, and more importantly how users will get their results.

To make a long story short – everyone’s Google results for a specific term, say the TV show “Lost” will be different when using real-time search. Everyone’s. This is because if you are selecting Latest Results, you’re jumping into the world of real-time which will include updates from Facebook and Twitter that are using those keywords. Check out this sample query for AT&T.

Notice anything? If you guessed that ‘sentiment is now reflected in Google results’ – you win. Who doesn’t win in this situation? AT&T. Regardless of what AT&T does with any of their PPC buys or SEO their search results page now is going to be trumped by sentiment in large part gathered from Social Media networks. And right now, sentiment towards AT&T is at almost an all-time low. If I were someone who was making a purchasing decision regarding a new cell phone, checking Google’s real-time search would certainly have an influence in that choice. And that’s big.

So where is this all going? Google is obviously looking to capitalize on the growth of social search. Will this make traditional search engine optimization less important in the world of real-time? As an advertiser, will I run into the possibility that a PPC Google Ad for my product will show up next to a Tweet that’s tearing it apart?

Check out this short video direct from Google.

This is one big example of why businesses NEED to be aware of what’s being said about them and engage with their customers on social networks. With Google now in the social search game (and with 70% of the search volume being done on Google), sentiment in real-time has the potential to make or break a brand.

Have you used real-time search yet? Will you? More importantly, what do you think this means for traditional SEO? Leave us a comment and let’s chat.