Google+ Updates: Real-Time Search, Hashtags and YouTube

Yesterday, Google released a video featuring its Senior Vice President of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, announcing that Google+ is going to be getting big updates in both real-time search and hashtag support.

The company's social network, which thus far hasn't exactly found mainstream success, will now feature search results that update instantly (the service just got its own search capabilities last month) and hashtags that are clickable. These clickable tags will then take users to search results for the terms.

"We're trying to make it easier to follow and contribute to live events on Google+," says Gundotra, "Including breaking news, sporting events and many others."

When it comes to search, relevance and punctuality are what drive this new update; now that Google has a unique pool of crowd-created information, it can produce real-time results. In fact, G+ posts have already started being integrated into Web search results. (Maybe that's bad timing after employee Steve Yegge's harsh critique of the social network on Google+ yesterday.)

In other G+ news, Google has made it possible for users to link their YouTube accounts with their Google+ profiles. Now videos shared with you on the social network will be added directly to your YouTube homepage.

Linking the two profiles is a matter of going to the "Sharing" tab in your YouTube account settings; there will be a link prompting you to "manage all your Google connected accounts" and from there you can join the two.

This isn't the first time that Google has incorporated G+ into one of their many other services (or even with YouTube, which has already had Hangouts integration), but it is probably the biggest merger since Plus accounts were linked to Google Docs.