If there is perhaps one universal truth about the Web, it’s that people want it now.

During the past 15 years, our expectations for how quickly information should be delivered to us over the Internet have changed. Now a delay of minutes on a breaking news story is unacceptable, as we saw during the frantic search for information in the hours after Michael Jackson died last year.

Enter real-time search. Search has been our gateway to the Web for almost as long as it has existed, and the big search players of the day are gearing up to handle a new challenge: how can the explosion of instant content produced by news organizations, blogs, and social-media users be organized in a relevant fashion, sorting through one of the worst signal-to-noise ratios in modern communication? Oh, and by the way, those results have to be displayed instantly.

“If information was generated seconds ago that’s relevant to what I am looking for, it should be available to me in one place,” said Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow and a legend in the search industry who is responsible for Google’s real-time search project. “It’s awfully hard.”

This is for real

There’s no going back to a delayed publishing model for media companies: deadlines are dead in the real-time world. And more and more regular people realize every day that there is an audience for the thoughts, rants, and banal moments in their day-to-day lives.

The result is a content explosion, the likes of which crushed Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s dream of one day indexing the entire Web. That may have been a pipe dream to begin with, but it’s definitely not going to happen now.

So if search engines are to remain relevant themselves, they’ll need to make sense of this content. And unless social-media networks are able to make their content discoverable, they won’t turn into the types of content-discovery engines that their public-relations people like to imagine are already here.

Expect the importance of real-time search to only grow over the next several years. For example, Yahoo’s search deal with Microsoft does not include real-time indexing and ranking efforts, as the company believes that it’s too important to give away.

“We think of (real-time search) as a very strategic and important asset, and we are going to continue to invest in it in a big way,” Seth said.

It’s been about four months since Google integrated real-time results into its pages, and a bit longer since Google and Microsoft cut deals with Twitter to bring that service’s “firehose” feed directly into those companies. Real-time search today is in its infancy, but it’s the next stage in the evolution of Internet search.

Time to get real

So, what is “real-time” content? There are nearly as many definitions as there are companies scrambling to get their names associated with one of the more hyped developments in Internet publishing.

Most people agree it centers on the concept of microblogging, or instant publishing of content to the open Web from social-media services. But in practice, “real-time search is still primarily Twitter search,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land.

Microsoft’s Paul Yiu, one of Bing’s leading real-time search experts, agreed. Bing has centered almost all of its real-time search efforts on its Bing.com/twitter page. The 140-character service is the undisputed king of “what’s happening now” status updates and continues to grow amid high-profile anecdotes such as uprisings in Iran and the landing of a jetliner in the Hudson River.

Beyond Twitter, however, Yiu thinks there are two components to real-time information: the actual content of the status update or post, and the link that is being shared within that update. Both parts are relevant to a searcher’s query, Yiu said.

Tobias Peggs, president of start-up OneRiot, has built an entire company on the premise that the link being shared within the status update is more relevant than the message itself. When you search for a topic with the intent of finding out what’s happening with, say, the bombings in Moscow last week, OneRiot analyzes the links being shared within status updates and user-controlled sites like Digg to determine the most relevant pieces of content being shared at a given moment.

“We filter through that real-time social noise and extract the useful signal,” Peggs said, surfacing the definitive Los Angeles Times story about the bombings being retweeted by thousands of users as opposed to a tweet that says “OMG, those Moscow bombings are really bad.”

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Sharp Corp said it plans to start making this year advanced 3D displays for cellphones and other mobile devices that don’t require special viewing glasses, betting that demand for 3D images will grow beyond movie theatres and living rooms to portable machines.

Stirring demand for small-sized displays is important for Japanese LCD panel suppliers after they suffered sluggish demand for panels designed for portable electronics due to a sharp slide in mobile phone sales in the domestic market.

Sharp launched mobile phones and PCs equipped with a display that enables users to watch 3D images without glasses in the early 2000s.

But they have not really caught on because of such factors as bulkiness, insufficient brightness and the lack of 3D contents.

Sharp since then has developed brighter and thinner 3D displays with higher resolution and a touch panel function.

“In the 2D era, contents and infrastructure have spread from movies to homes, and from homes to mobile devices,” Sharp Executive Managing Officer Yoshisuke Hasegawa told a news conference on Friday.

“We believe the same thing will happen with 3D. Three-dimensional images that mostly inhabit big screens now are about to hit mobile terminals.”

Hasegawa, head of Sharp’s LCD business, did not disclose a sales target for the new 3D display.

Consumer electronics makers are scrambling to launch 3D TVs this year, hoping the technology will be as big a boost for the industry as the transition to color TVs from black and white.

Panasonic Corp and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd have already released 3D models, while Sony Corp is planning to start offering 3D TVs in June.

But analysts have said the need for special 3D glasses may keep consumers from adopting the technology quickly.

Mobile electronics that let users enjoy 3D images without special glasses have been around for some time, since people tend to watch the display from a fixed distance and with a fixed angle on personal devices such as mobile phones, making it technologically less challenging to offer a 3D function.

Japanese game maker Nintendo Co said last month it planned to launch a new model of its DS handheld game console that allows users to play 3D games without using special glasses.

Hasegawa said the company has already received inquiries on the new product from mobile phone makers and other potential customers, but declined to say if Nintendo is one of them.

Shares of Sharp, the world’s fourth-largest LCD TV maker behind Samsung, Sony and LG Electronics Inc, closed 2.7 percent higher at 1,209 yen on Friday, outperforming the Tokyo stock market’s electrical machinery index, which gained 0.8 percent.

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A year ago, a variant of the high-profile Conficker worm was all set to stir, programmed to begin receiving update instructions on April 1, with potential consequences being anybody’s guess.

Those fears were unfounded as the worm’s worst impact appeared to be that it installed malware that displays fake antivirus warnings.

The time bomb failed to blow up, and the buzz died down. But a year later several variants of the worm are still around and growing, albeit slowly–causing problems for unsuspecting Windows users.

Conficker caused major headaches for CNET TV associate producer Jason Howell a few weeks ago at the SXSW Interactive show as he tried to edit and publish the Buzz Out Loud podcast.

Howell said that Conficker must have been hiding on a TriCaster video production device, which was running Windows, that Howell was using at the conference on loan from the manufacturer, NewTek. He inserted a USB thumb drive into the device and saw a window pop up for a split second before disappearing. “I thought that was weird,” he said in an interview on Tuesday.

Then he put the thumb drive into his work laptop and got a warning from the antivirus software on the machine that Conficker was installed on the thumb drive. He had the software delete the malware from the USB before it could infect his laptop.

To confirm his suspicions, Howell re-inserted the thumb drive into the TriCaster device and back into the laptop several times and got the warning each time. The problem did not stop there. When he tried working on the TriCaster machine the system began crashing, he said.

“The only way to get Conficker off was to re-install the partition from the disk image,” Howell said. “I had to wipe out the proprietary software and start from scratch.”

Three hours later or so, he was finally able to get the Buzz Out Loud program up on the CNET Web site.

“NewTek cautions people not to install Windows software on the devices because it interferes with the hardware,” which is likely what Conficker was doing, he said.

Howell was able to protect his systems, but many other people get infected and don’t realize it. And it’s popping up in some unexpected places. For instance, Spanish-based Panda Security found Conficker, along with malware related to the Mariposa account data stealing botnet and a Lineage password-stealing Trojan, on a brand new Android-based Vodafone HTC Magic smart phone in early March.

The ABCs (and E, too) of Conficker
The version of the worm with the April 1, 2009, trigger date, Conficker.C, is dying off, dropping from a high of nearly 1.5 million infections at the time to fewer than 220,000 now, according to Symantec estimates.

However, two earlier versions–Conficker.A and Conficker.B–are on an estimated 6.5 million computers, Symantec said.

Conficker.A, also known as Downadup, exploits a vulnerability in Windows that Microsoft patched in October 2008. Conficker.B added the ability to spread through network shares and via removable storage devices like USB drives, through the AutoRun function in Windows. Conficker.C blocks the computer from security services and Web sites, downloads a Trojan and reaches out to other infected computers via peer-to-peer networking.

A subsequent variant, dubbed Conficker.E, was released on April 8, 2009, but deleted itself from infected systems on or after May 3, 2009, according to Symantec.

To stay Conficker-free, computer users should keep their antivirus software up-to-date–a move that saved CNET’s Howell–and install the latest security patches for Windows and other software.

Right now, the worm isn’t really doing much more than spreading to new machines and lurking. It’s a waiting game for law enforcement. Computer owners may not realize they have the worm on their machines, but security researchers know it’s out there and are monitoring the Internet for signs of it coming to life, said Vincent Weafer, vice president of Symantec Security Response.

The infections are primarily on computers in emerging markets, like Asia and Latin America “where there is a higher degree of software piracy,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. Pirated software can’t be updated, so computers running counterfeit copies of Windows will remain unpatched, he said.

“Effectively, nothing has happened to these (infected) machines,” Weafer said. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen…it’s still a significant botnet (network of infected bots) sitting out there.”

Most botnets are used to send spam and they are more effective if they operate under the radar so they can’t be shut down. Conficker made a huge splash in the news, and it’s likely that its creators have abandoned it and that it will eventually fade away, Weafer predicted.

“This is such a high-profile botnet that it makes it very toxic to use,” he said.

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