Lee Hower has an interesting blog post saying that “real-time” search is actually discovery:

Search is when you know basically what you’re looking for in advance, discovery is when you want things to be revealed to you. Search experts talk about lots of different forms of search… recall or recovery search (when you know a name or a brand and are trying to locate it), research search (trying to learn more about a topic or concept), competitive or comparative search (seeking similar concepts or objects to one already known), etc. Most of the products we call real-time search today involve consumers and companies wanting to find out what’s happening right now and perhaps explore the conversation or draw high level conclusions from it. That’s discovery.