During Google’s third quarter earnings call today, CEO Eric Schmidt was asked, “With the Web becoming more social and realtime, how does Google compete in that world?” The question comes on the heels of yesterday’s announcement by Bing that it is bringing in more data from Facebook to make its search results more social. Schmidt’s response essentially is that the Google’s search algorithm will absorb more realtime and social data over time: “With respect to social and realtime, we use complex signals to do ranking. Over time we will add realtime and social cues.” Some of this comes in the form of direct data feeds, such as Google gets from Twitter.

During regular trading hours today, Google’s stock was down a little over $2 a share, or about half a percent. Ho-hum, nothing big, probably just some investors worried they might mildly disappoint once again this quarter.

Over the last few months, there’s been quite a bit of buzz (and some unease) building around a new kind of fragmentation that’s coming to Google’s Android OS. Up until now, the primary way people have downloaded third party applications has been through the official Android Market, an online app marketplace run by Google that’s analogous to Apple’s App Store.

Yes, according to multiple reports and our own experience (see left) Yahoo.com , the Internet’s biggest portal is currently down for the count, both in the US and abroad. Maybe the traffic behemoth couldn’t take all the “merging with AOL” speculation and just decided to take the day off? From what it looks like Yahoo! subsites like mail.yahoo.com and news.yahoo.com are still up

GOGII’s free text group text messaging service textPlus today announces its first direct carrier partnership with Metro PCS Communications Inc . Currently the textPlus app allows you to send text messages for free to any number using the in-app advertising. In this next iteration the service will be available separate from an app and not just piggy backing but directly integrated into a product

Google did something pretty

Moments ago on its earnings call , Google took an opportunity to talk about the success of its latest products. The first in line: Google Instant , the totally revamped search interface that Google launched last month, which displays search results as soon as you begin typing (rather than requiring the user to hit ‘enter’ or click the search button). At the time of the launch, there was much speculation on what impact Instant would have on Google’s bottom line — was it designed to boost the number of ads displayed?

View this document on Scribd Google released third quarter earnings a few minutes ago. Above are the slides showing its results

Milo, a startup that highlights local inventory in product search results both on the web and mobile devices, has struck a deal with comparison shopping site PriceGrabber today. The nature of the deal allows PriceGrabber to list the local brick and mortar stores where products are available within a search for a product. Milo.com tracks the real-time availability and prices of more than 3 million products at over 50,000 stores across the U.S.

A couple days ago, we noted that real time search engine Scoopler was pivoting away from that product and transforming into JustSpotted , a celebrity tracking site. A key to this new service is the use of Twitter data (alongside Foursquare and Facebook data) to track where celebrities are around the world in real time. The plan was for JustSpotted to use their Scoopler technology alongside their access to the Twitter firehose to make this all work.