Google+ team rolled/rolling out two new updates on their social network platform – Real time search and better support for hashtags.

#1 Real-time search

Have you searched on twitter at search.twitter.com? Once you enter a keyword and hit search, it shows the list of tweets filtered for that keyword. If you stay on that page for  a while, you’ll notice a message appear on the top saying 6 new tweets (or whatever number it is). Once you click on it, you’ll be able to read those 6 new realtime tweets and this gets constantly updated. So, what basically happens here is – twitter monitors all tweets for that particular keyword and shows you in real time – that’s called search in real time.

You thought you missed that cool feature in Google+? Don’t worry your frustration was heard and Google+ is rolling out real time search today. (It is enabled progressively, so if it didn’t work for you may have to wait a day or two). Once this feature is enabled for you, you can start searching as usual using the Google+ search box. While you stay on that search page, if any new posts are added to Google+ with the same keyword, you’ll see a link appearing saying 6 more recent post (or whatever number it is) on the top. As soon as you click on that message, it’ll show you those 6 posts and there onwards it’ll automatically update as new stories come in for that search keyword. Cool huh!!

#2 Hashtag support (Hashtag turns into a link automatically)

Hashtag (#keyword) is a interesting and a simple way of adding extra metadata to any piece of content. For e.g you could write a hashtag of #OccupyWallStreet to talk about a story on Wall Street Protest). Using this simple method, all content that contains a similar hashtag could be easily grouped, searched, trended, etc…

Today onwards, if you write a post or share any content and add a #hashtag, Google+ will automatically translate it into a link. Once the receiver  reads the post, he’ll be seeing that hashtag turned as a link and he can just click on it and read all posts shared (including this and posts shared by others) with that particular hashtag.

Google+ update with real time search and improved #hashtag support video

Both these new features are great addition to Google+ and will serve like a swiss army knife to google+  and social media power users.