Twitter Search: What Are The Realtime Alternatives?
Posted Thursday 22nd October 2009 by Tobias in SEO, Social Media.
Real Time Relevancy
Google is concerned about real time search, make no mistake about it – that is why they have set up a similar agreement with Twitter to that made by MSN powered search engine, Bing.
Although there is no algorithm in place to filter relevant results, as with Google, Yahoo Search, Bing etc, real time search has its uses, and as more and more people use social media as part of their everyday life, it will be used even more.
In the past, you would have heard about, for example, a new song or album when listening to it on the radio or MTV, but also word of mouth. People who hear the song/album before you pass on their thoughts about it through conversation, and today that largely means via Facebook, Twitter, Digg and a whole host of other social media platforms. And that is why there is the need for real time search – people trust information that has been passed on by friends and like-minded people.
The other main benefit of real time search is of course the immediacy of news that can be sourced: as well as the latest fashion, technology, cars etc, people want the latest news and information and they want it fast.
There are many real time search engines out there – most are of course in beta as uses and functionality become clearer with time. Aside from Twitter search, which has been making the headlines of late, there are many other real time search engines and so it is worth taking a look at a few of them and their uses.
The Competition
OneRiot – Essentially performs real-time search of content that users are sharing between Twitter and social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious etc.
Aside from social media, its search results are gathered from mainstream media so it is limited, but has a high relevancy due to the quality of content supplied from the mainstream. A useful browser toolbar is also available to download.
FriendFeed – searches information passed on via Twitter, Digg, Google Reader, Tumblr and images from Flickr. FriendFeeds recent collaboration with Facebook should mean a host of improvements and developments are set to take place in the near future.
Almost.at is a real time search engine that searches event streaming through Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. This is very useful for specific events as separate video, image and link results sections result in efficient collation of information, in real time of course.
Collecta – claims to be the fastest real time search engine around and doesn’t just source its results from Twitter either. Collecta uses the same technology as the forthcoming Google Wave – the XMPP instant messaging protocol, making for accurate real time results. One to watch out for as still in its infancy at present.
DailyRT – as its name suggests, this is a real time search engine that collates information from Twitter retweets, which is limited yet passes on information that has been retweeted, and thus, should be relevant to the search term, unless it has been spammed of course.
Convoflow – real time social media search using Twitter, Friendfeed, YouTube, flickr, blogcatalog, technorati, Digg. Very basic user interface, yet uncluttered is good in our book. Search relevancy not quite as good as alternative sites as yet.
Finally, a useful search tool is Targ8 – the search engines’ search engine, which allows users to view tabs of search results from the major search engines including Google, Bing, yahoo, and twitter.
In conclusion, real time search is itself in beta: nobody really knows how useful it can be in the grand scheme of search engines, but as Google and Bing have been pro-active in getting involved via Twitter, it does suggest that real time search will become an important everyday tool for you and I, and it’s well worth checking out the alternatives to Twitter search, whilst also looking forward to Google and Bing’s collaboration with Twitter.
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