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As we enter 2010, it’s safe to say that web 1.0  is a virtual dead duck. The year has heralded the success of interactive services such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, whose salubrious offerings have turned out to be the champions of web 2.0.  One problem, however, remains in looking through the thousands of online conversations happening every day, across multiple platforms – how do we search them?

Interestingly, four of the biggest companies that exist online – Google, Amazon, Ebay and Yahoo – all revolve around search. The overriding desire to categorise the vast expansion of the internet is what drives our online habits, but as with everything digital, it’s constantly changing.

The key here is relevance, and Google’s recent move of integrating real time search results for news and social media is a step in the right direction. Access to real time search has been around for some time, with sites such as surchur and trendsmap offering users the ability to search multiple online platforms from one place. Essentially, real time search combined with social search engines provide us with results much more relevant and useful than the outmoded ‘catch all’ solutions being bolted on by Google and Yahoo – whilst these still have their place, the future is relevance.

Social search also makes monitoring your brand online much easier. With the multitude of social media sites giving consumers, commentators and competitors the chance to feedback on your products and services, its useful to keep track of what people are saying about your brand. To that end, here are my top five online tools for keeping your ear close to the digital ground:

1. Whostalkin.com: really useful tool for searching blogs, social networks, news sites and forums. The list of sites covered isn’t exhaustive but all of the main platforms are included – great for searching comments on blogs and User Generated Comment (UGC).

2. Surchur.com: another great engine that looks through Google blogs and some popular ‘news aggregators’, sites which collect headlines based on a users preferences or search terms such as Google News  or newsvine. Also has a great function called the surchmeter, which gives your keyword a rating based on its popularity on Surchur, twitter and blogs.

3. Backtweets.com: Had an article published online? Just uploaded a new page to your website? Backtweets lets you search the twittersphere for people linking back to the page or web address. Having a twitter user tweet about your webpage is a virtual vote of popularity, so a great metric to measure.

4. Trendsmap.com: technically, this isn’t a social search tool, but is so useful I thought it worth including. Trendsmap gives a real time overview of what’s happening on Twitter, geographically overlayed onto a Google Map. When clicked, tweets appear in real time from across the globe. Whilst it doesn’t have the function to search for tweets yet, the developer is promising to add new features. Brilliant for news gathering and spotting opportunities for your brand to comment on issues as they unfold on the web.

5. Icerocket.com: great functionality combined with the ability to pinpoint blogs, twitter or the web. Offers real time updates and a great, easy to navigate interface. Also offers the feature for users to build RSS (really simple syndication) feeds based on search terms, much like the popular Google Reader.