Google has relaunched Google Replay as part of an improved real-time search feature.

Google Replay was Google’s attempt at presenting Twitter search results in a new fashion, giving you a time-line graph. By clicking on the time-line you could select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from one specific time period.

The service soon disappeared, but has now reappeared at a new Google Realtime Search page.

You can also find this microblog search tool by doing a regular Google search and then click on “More” and “Updates” in the left hand column of the search result page.

Resourceshelf reports that the “Updates” database contains content from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, and Google Buzz. Only Twitter is covered by the Replay tool, and then only back to February this year. The idea is to expand the historical Twitter database back to 2006.

You can narrow searches by clicking on the time-line (to select a month or a date) or by selecting “location” in the left hand column. A link to “Updates with Images” give you the same results with image thumbnails fetched from the blog or the page the microblog entries are linking to.

In the right hand column you will find links to the most popular web site links at the time of your search query.

Finally, Google may also add a link to the full conversation leading up to a tweet or update if possible.

Is this and important upgrade for Google?

We think so, as Twitter and other social web sites contain a lot of interesting references to online resources that will be of use to journalists, librarians, researchers and other investigators. Remember that Twitter & Co is much more than senseless chatter about making dinner and going to bed. People use this services to look for information, and by using Google Realtime you can tap into those searches.

Google Realtime can also be used to research trends and retrace the development of a particular happening, let’s say a natural disaster or a political scandal.

See also Google Tutor: Google Increases Focus On Realtime With Realtime Search Page