So, this is where we are right now: Someone somewhere ignited some buzz over the idea of "real-time search," and the Internet's top players all adopted it as their Holy Grail. That's why Microsoft and Google made a biggg dealll over their recent partnerships with Twitter. And that's why Yahoo, too, has now jumped on the real-time bandwagon.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo is teaming with real-time search startup OneRiot to incorporate up-to-the-moment results in search. The article states that the test is scheduled to go live on certain search queries within a few days.

By teaming with OneRiot, Yahoo will be able to aggregate search results from social services like Twitter and Digg.

OneRiot CEO Kimbal Musk told Internet Evolution at the Web 2.0 Summit that his site tries to find "the pulse of the Web" on any subject. "The idea being that if you think about Google you're searching a library. If you think about OneRiot you kind of want to know what's going on, what do people care about?"

The partnership with Yahoo is a bit of a win for OneRiot, which told Internet Evolution that 99 percent of its searches come through its partner network and that it was hoping to add a big-name partner soon. "We have about 70 partners in the real-time Web space that are leveraging real-time Web search through OneRiot in their applications," said Musk. Now OneRiot is adding an established search partner to its list through Yahoo.

But, in truth, how important is this for either player?

Sure, Yahoo has more market share than OneRiot's other partners -- or what Musk calls the "5 percent" of the Web. But Yahoo is also rapidly losing relevance in the search arena.

Moreover, Yahoo's main competitors made the first jump into real-time search when Google and Bing announced deals with Twitter, which even Musk admitted is "obviously a really serious threat."

On the other hand, Musk thinks Twitter's partnerships with Google and Bing bring credibility to real-time search.

"Real-time search is the first real innovation in probably over a decade," he said. "When you see players like Google and Bing saying we respect that this is a problem to go tackle... it brings a ton of credibility to what we're doing."

That's one way to look at it. Or... for more cold truth about Google and Bing's foray into real-time search, just check out the vblog below:

— Nicole Ferraro, Site Editor, Internet Evolution