Real-time search engines have proliferated over the last month, with a series of launches from start-ups like Topsy, almost.at and Scoopler. The companies are hoping to edge in on a space that Google co-founder Larry Page has admitted is a weakness for the search giant. And they’re using microblogging and social bookmarking sites as tools to figure out what content is relevant up to the second.
Real-time search is valuable because it lets you know what’s happening right now on any given topic. Companies use it to handle customer service. News junkies use it to follow political events.
And I’ve tested out nine real-time search offerings by pointing them all to Iran’s disputed elections to compare their results. At the end of this post, I’ve also covered two further contenders who launched just in the last couple of days.
The issue for real-time search is figuring out the right balance between immediacy, popularity and relevance. Stream everything without any filtering, and a search could bring up a lot of irrelevant chatter. Filter too strongly, and a search might omit important trends that have been picked up in the last hour.
All of the real-time start-ups search Twitter, and some have added in social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious. Because Twitter already has an in-house search engine through its acquisition of Summize last year, the newer start-ups have to differentiate their products by filtering content based on relevancy and popularity. At this time, Twitter search only produces results by how recently they were published.
Almost.at and Scoopler have designed their user interfaces to favor the most recent content, whileTweetmeme, OneRiot, DailyRT and Topsy focus more on what’s popular.
Google hasn’t confirmed any specific projects in real-time search, although it may only be a matter of time. Co-founder Larry Page said last month at Google’s Zeitgeist conference that the company has fallen behind Twitter.
“People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it,” he said. “We’ve done a relatively poor job of doing things that work on a per second basis.”
Scoopler: Real-Time Search as Channel-Surfing.
Scoopler gives a results page divided into two columns, one with unfiltered live content and the other with results sorted by popularity. It gives a nice balance of what’s happening right at the moment and what content has surfaced to the top via retweets and shares in the last few hours.
“Users should be able to create custom streams and watch all the live video, commentary and content in one place,” said Scoopler co-founder AJ Asver.
Search Results: I get a mix of news stories from the BBC and YouTube videos posted as recently as two hours ago along with a live conversation stream about cell phone blackouts and Iranian authorities using Twitter to spread disinformation.
Sources: Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Flickr, Identica
Funding: Incubated by Y Combinator. Asver founded Scoopler with MIT computer science grad Dilan Jayawardane, whom he met through networking in London, and the pair publicly launched the service last month.
Topsy: Real-Time Search as Social Search .
Topsy scans only Twitter and gives more weight to a source’s authority and how many times a piece of content has been shared. It ranks the influence of individual Twitter accounts by measuring the fraction of their tweets that attract responses and re-tweets from followers. Results from more “influential” Twitterers are ranked higher.
“We imagine search as a process filtered by the social web,” said Rishab Ghosh, Topsy co-founder and vice president of research.
Search Results: When searching “Iran,” I actually get links to competitor Twazzup’s custom Iran search and to Boston’s Big Picture blog. It’s a little less useful than Scoopler for learning about what’s happening right now in Tehran, although I do find a few heavily followed Iranian Twitter accounts that only began posting within the last 24 hours.
Sources: Twitter, although Ghosh says the company may incorporate other sources
Funding: $15 million in equity and debt to date, including $900,000 in seed funding from angel investor and Listbot founder Scott Banister. Other backers include Blue Run Ventures, Ignition Partners, Founders Fund and Western Technology Investment. See VentureBeat’s coverage here.
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http://venturebeat.com/2009/06/20/who-rules-real-time-search-a-look-at-9-contenders/
lemyaskin rulezz
Posted by: lemyaskin | 09/22/2009 at 10:07 PM