On my onsite blog, I have seen alerts in as few as 10 minutes and indexing like you said with AR. Matt Cutts commented on it a few weeks ago on his blog. This is actually beneficial as a search engine in general as newswires and so forth can be as up to date online as they are on tv and radio fo breaking news stories and so forth. I think this is an overall advance for search engines as a whole...

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Ryan Ward, REALTOR® - Keller Williams Realty Consultants. (404) 630-3187
Atlanta Real Estate - My featured area is Alpharetta Real Estate and it is where I call home. Read my Atlanta Real Estate blog.