Real-Time Search Startups Gaining Traction

As microblogging sites like Twitter are being used for reporting news stories, many companies have taken advantage, creating real-time search engines. The advantage is also in the fact that Google has pointed out its inability to capture real-time information as a weakness. Although Twitter’s search engine gives instant results based on time of update, other real-time search engines are refining this approach by incorporating other tools that can filter out unnecessary information.

One of the startups creating a buzz around its real-time search engine is Scoopler. According to Venture Beat, “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 can customize the information that they receive from their live streams, filtering out unwanted information, and prioritizing articles and videos that they find interesting.

OneRiot is another startup that focuses on the most shared content, with an emphasis on data analysis. Venture Beat writes, “OneRiot focuses on the actual content users are sharing via Twitter and Digg instead of their tweets and commentary. The company says it factors in 26 different criteria in its search engine, including a link’s freshness, its domain authority or how reputable the Web site is, and velocity or the speed at which a link is shared through the community”. OneRiot’s strong points come into play with its aggressive spam filters. Normally, spammers on Twitter can just attach any hash tag to their Tweets, and show up in search results, but OneRiot analyzes the data for its users before rendering results.

As the need for real-time information increases, many companies see this as an opportunity to break with traditional search engine competition, and branch out into what the users want—instantaneous information.