Indexing and retrieving real time content in a social networking system is disclosed. A user-term index includes user-term partitions, each user-term partition comprising temporal databases. As a post is received from a user, a user identifier, a post identifier, and a post is extracted. An object store communicatively coupled to a temporal database for recently received content is queried to determine whether terms in the post has already been stored. A term identifier is stored in the user-term index with the user and post identifiers. A forward index stores the post by post identifier. Responsive to a search query, the user-term index is searched by the user's connections and the terms. A real time search engine compiles the results of the user-term index query and retrieves the stored posts from the forward index. The search results may then be ranked and cached before presentation to the searching user.