Status updates from Facebook pages have begun to appear in Google’s real-time search results this week.

The new addition marks the first time the global leader of search has indexed content from the world’s largest social network in real-time. Despite Facebook’s popularity it has been the last of the three most widely used social media networks to be integrated into Google’s real-time search; ‘Tweets’ were indexed last December and MySpace updates began appearing in the feed earlier this month.

The new feature for Google real-time is likely to appeal to a significant number of users and subsequently help make the fledgling feature more attractive in terms of search engine marketing investment. Real-time and social search features have rapidly expanded over the past year and is one of the key areas of competition between Google and Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

Critically though, the new Google feature will incorporate Facebook Pages, not the public status updates of individual users. Given that Pages are widely used to promote services, brands, events, products and organisations, the new real-time indexing is more akin to expanding search engine marketing on Google real-time rather than its direct appeal to social media users.

Since there are more than 3 million active Pages with more than 5.3 billion fans on the social network this could be a significant addition to the deal between Google and Facebook. According to the Facebook press office, more than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day; appearing Google search is certain to extend the reach of this type of marketing.

Online news provider Digital Beat has noted that though Google has now arguably incorporated more of Facebook’s content into its search features, competitor Microsoft is better positioned to take advantage of the user content generation that takes place on the social network. As well as powering searches that take place on Facebook pages and serving PPC ads to the site via Bing, Microsoft is an investor – and has the ability to index public status updates.