Nearly three short years ago, the buzz word du jour in tech was “realtime”. Real time discovery. Real time search. Real time serendipity. The explosion of interest in social sharing tools like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed (remember this was early 2009) had people (myself included) saying that “Delayed news will no longer be acceptable for early adopters, who will gravitate to the quickest sources of news, wherever they may be.” In practice, while this has occasionally been true, I’ve found a completely divergent innovation to play as big a role in the way I (and others) consume news content and entertainment - that of time shifting, which has remained valuable at a time when most real-time search engines have pivoted or vanished.

Best exemplified by TiVo and other DVRs, preceded by the creaky VCR, the act of consuming media at a time much after its initial airing is so commonplace that live viewings are so uncommon that friends often tiptoe around current storylines for top shows. In some social circles, only the most breaking drama series get the “day it actually aired” treatment - like Breaking Bad, Dexter or Homeland, while everything else goes to TiVo, to be consumed later. (Obviously, I saw the season finales for Dexter and Homeland last night)

News, with some exceptions, can be similarly stored away for later viewing, be it through RSS readers or on your social network of choice. One must not be glued to the real time stream to make sure you don’t miss anything. Instead, the RSS reader traps your own hand-picked links, ready for viewing when you get the opportunity, not necessarily tied to their time of posting.

On the big screen, movies may bank on a massive opening weekend, but with consumers having so many options for entertainment sources, it’s common to see people mention they’ll “wait for Netflix”, which could be months or years away, content to save a few dollars while also getting the comfort of watching in their own home. And if you do find yourself suddenly interested in a show your friends have been seeing which has been out a few seasons, don’t fret, as you can, in almost all cases, catch up - tapping into many options, be they Netflix, Hulu, Xfinity, iTunes or Android Market.

This fall, I made it a personal mission to watch all of Mad Men, after hearing people go on and on about its quality. I powered through it with many late-night Netflix marathons. After finally ordering Showtime, I caught up on this season’s Dexter on Xfinity, and then did the same for Homeland. If my wife misses her favorite shows, she can do the same, tapping into the various video repositories on the web, including the big three networks, typically slower to adapt to the innovation of the web.

I watch my evening talk shows 3 to 5 in a row, from Jon Stewart to Conan, fast forwarding through commercials and skipping uninteresting guests - efficiently getting the best and skipping the rest. It’s almost the same approach I take to my RSS reader or activity on the social networks, skimming, reading, clicking and leaving no prisoners. Even if I’m not constantly connected, and I do a good job of getting close, I don’t feel this sense of missing something.

Realtime reactions to breaking news events, kicked off by an initial discovery, and then rattling around search engines and social media, can’t be duplicated by time shifted content, but for most buckets of content, be they text, audio or video, the drive to be first and in the mix of the story as it is interpreted and curated, is not essential. Advents in information and content sharing over the last few years have instead made “on demand” a reality, getting me what I want when I want it, not when someone else decides for me.

This afternoon, at TechCrunch's Real-Time Crunchup event, representatives from many of the innovators in the real-time search space had a quick round table aimed at furthering the discussion, framed by a question by moderator Erick Schonfeld, who said that some on the panel may believe real-time search is defined by Twitter Search, while others believe it is "everything on the Internet, but with a freshness or recency component". And while many different companies, including the standard-bearers, like Google and Microsoft, are looking to take on this new challenge, how they are doing it differs greatly.

Danny Sullivan, author of Search Engine Land, said, "We need better definitions of what it is, so as consumers and users, we understand what we are interacting with. Through Twitter and a few other services, you have the option to publish in a few seconds. Maybe you call it social sharing search." (He also posted a summary of the players last night)

Some of the participants could be defined by how large a percentage of their data was initiated through Twitter, and how they worked with the data, including filtering.

"I would define it as what are people saying in real time about my topic," said Gerry Campbell of Collecta. "It's not what is most important, but it's what is in real time now."

This bifurcation of the "one right answer", often championed by the existing search leaders, versus what's most right "now" is helping to separate the old school search engines from this new breed. But don't think that the more-established companies are taking this lying down.

Google's Matt Cutts, who has been at the company since 2000, said "we have always talked about freshness of content." He relayed a history of his time at Google, saying they once had a "war room" of how they could refresh their search index as frequently as a month. By 2003, the company had moved from monthly updates to daily updates, and a few years later, in 2007, integrated the company's Blog Search product into its main search results. "We have rearchitected our system to be as recent as possible," Cutts said.

As updates flow in at an ever-increasing pace from all corners of the Web, search engines have the daunting task of getting accurate responses out there, while ignoring off-topic or harmful data, such as spam. And those who manage to get the formula right will have a serious leg up over those who don't filter well, making their results more noise than signal.

"Drinking from the firehose is a ticking time bomb," said Kimbal Musk of OneRiot. "Even by filtering 90 percent of what is going on with the Iran election, you're still only going to get a tiny slice, and a good portion of that is spam. If you don't filter content, you are going to get more and more spam." He later added, "If you stick to Twitter alone, you will have a spam-filled and biased data set."

With Twitter's API getting to a point where more and more companies are relying on it as their engine and data source, each is working of a common data set, and how they interact with the information will make the difference. And yes, Microsoft or Google may give you one result that is most accurate, but not for this moment, and not with any kind of impact from your friends or in terms of how that data is being interacted with in real time.

Sean Stutcher of Microsoft clearly stated this information is becoming more relevant, saying, "The sentiment around a link could be changing, and that might become very relevant to a user."

In an isolated search world, where an index is an index and the right answer is the right answer, that might not matter. But in real-time, it could matter immensely. As each of these companies works through their user interfaces, their data sets, and improves filters and social aspects, it should be very interesting to see how they separate from the pack and help define their goal.