As of yesterday, Google+ has started to roll out a couple of updates that bring extra functionality, and make it 'easier to follow and contribute to live events'. One of the goodies is enhanced hashtag support while the other is real-time search.

The hashtag improvements basically make it so that terms you use hashtags for become links,. These links are to a search results page where you can find stories that contain the linked word.

Real-time search is pretty self-explanatory and allows result pages to be automatically updated when a new post is relevant to your query. Both these features should be available to all very soon.