I would be wary of jumping to conclusions from Google’s temporary shutdown of what it calls Realtime Search, where it searches social media feeds like Twitter, Facebook fan page updates, and Quora. Way too many observers think Google is trying to replace those social signals with Google+ and +1 data. That’s premature. Sure, Google will incorporate those and other signals into its results, even into its main results. But it looks like Google’s Twitter firehose contract ran out - coincidentally, the same week that Google+ launched in invitation-only form. Google may be playing hardball in contract negotiations, or it might just have gotten sloppy. But I expect we’ll see Twitter data in Google results again pretty soon. Meanwhile, here’s my usual argument on why social search will never completely replace search engines.