Google is no stranger to threats. It’d probably take all of the fingers and all of the toes of the company’s senior management to count the number of times some start-up has sprung out of the woodwork to claim it was taking Mountain View down.

So far, none have had any luck.

As market share numbers from just about every analytics company out there will show, Google has been steadily increasing its dominance of Internet search for months (and years). The latest numbers put Google’s share of search roughly between 50-70%.

But a new start-up is taking a different approach to search that, according to The Age, has peaked Google’s attention enough to warrant meetings with the new company to find out what they’re up to.

MyLiveSearch isn’t indexing the web. It isn’t building databases of websites. It’s crawling the web in real-time to bring users up-to-the-second results. And even the concept of such a search engine has to at least put MyLiveSearch on Google’s radar. According to Rob Gabriel, the man behind MyLiveSearch, his search engine will find all of the stuff that Google’s just to slow to notice.

MyLiveSearch is fundamentally different. It works through a small browser plug-in. The search terms are put through Google, or other indexed search databases, but those results are treated as “starting points” alongside the user’s bookmarks and other popular web hubs.

From there, the live search takes over, crawling through hundreds of web pages connected to those starting points in search of more information relevant to the search.

Within seconds users are given a set of results based on the pages the MyLiveSearch spider encounters. Gabriel told The Age that his search engine’s results are “almost always richer, more detailed and more useful” than what you’d get from a standard search engine.

The Age reports that Google representatives have met with the team behind MyLiveSearch “at least” twice. And Gabriel is apparently telling people that his technology could be plugged into any existing search engine to make it better. Perhaps this is exactly the route he wants to take - acquisition by Google (or a competitor).

MyLiveSearch isn’t slated to launch until middle or late June. And as TechCrunch points out, the folks behind the engine are making a lot of big claims for a technology that isn’t available yet. A beta program appears to be in the making as the site is currently accepting names and emails for a “beta team”… but few details are provided.

What do think about the idea? Could a live crawler be the next step in search engine evolution? To be totally honest… it sounds like an awesome idea. Assuming they can get the technology right (which they claim to have done) I think this could be huge. I’m not sure about you… but I’d be willing to wait a few seconds for live, just-crawled search results.

Only time will tell if MyLiveSearch is any different from every other company that’s claimed to have found the secret recipe to Google’s demise (or in the case of an acquisition… the next big edge). But you know there has to be something of interest there if Google has been meeting with these folks. Companies with a lead as commanding as Google’s don’t waste their time on things unless 1) they can improve the bottom line 2) they’re a threat.

So either way… I’d say Google is at least interested in the technology and/or theory being MyLiveSearch.

What do you think?