It’s a search engine. It should be current. I’d be concerned if it weren’t.
Current to the hour, or even the minute? How about as fast as you've typed something?
My understanding is that Google uses "googlebots" (a computer dedicated to searching for information on web pages) to read data that has been posted on a page, and then incorporate it into Google's database. It is also my understanding that you have to have read the data before you can return it in a search.
That this thread, which was created today, is already in Google's database, implies that Google has a searchbot parked here at Free Republic, which implies that Free Republic is getting more than the usual or ordinary scrutiny from Google.
Do you think they park a Googlebot at every website in the world? I noticed that minutes after I typed something over at "Ace of Spades", I accidentally did a search on what I had just typed (My copy and paste didn't work properly, the buffer hadn't cleared from what I had previously typed) and did you know that google returned a link to the very web page I had just finished typing that on?
Again, this is only possible if they have a googlebot parked on Ace of Spades, dutifully relaying everything typed there.
If you don't see this as ominous, I do not know how to make it clearer as to why it is.