jjprojects: our social web

There has been quite a lot of talk about real-time search during the past year or so. The focus is usually on Twitter Search and what Google is doing, or going to do to counter Twitter’s obvious potential in the area. However, there are other players and the number has been growing. Are they any good? Which is the best one for “right now”?

When asking these questions to myself, I figured the best way to find out was to compare them by searching for a current event that’s popular on the web at the moment. It’ll come as no surprise to many of you that I chose “oil spill”, which I’ve already written a couple of posts on in relation to social media.

My Top Picks

Because this is an extensive post, right up front let me say that my favourites at the moment are OneRiot and Scoopler, but I think which one is better really depends on what you’re looking for when you search.

I like OneRiot because I can go straight to their homepage at any given time and get an good snapshot of what’s trending “right now” across multiple social sites and networks. Some of the most popular stories in multiple categories are featured. This applies to Scoopler too, but you have to dig a little deeper than the homepage to scan more than a handful of popular topics that are trending. Searching on both these sites is quick and easy and produces quality, relevant results. I’d have to say that OneRiot is fast becoming my favourite, both for its design and features.

Having said that, following are 10 different offerings, including OneRiot and Scoopler.

Google Search (News and Updates)

When you do a general Google Search, you get results that by default include ‘Everything’. The most relevant in terms of real-time search are the categories ‘News’ and the new ‘Updates’. As far as real-time search goes, Google News is looking a little slow, although when I searched for “oil spill” there was a quality item at the top of the list from just “10 minutes ago”. Who’s to know how many people are sharing it around social media though? That’s also what I’m interested in.

The Updates section is a little more interesting in terms of real-time search. It provides status updates from just seconds ago that are constantly being fed in as you view. Looking there now, I see updates coming mostly from Twitter, one from Friendfeed and a couple from Facebook. The results in Updates don’t seem to be ranked in any way.

What’s useful for some purposes is the interactive graph you can use to view retrospective updates. You can easily tell when there has been a period of high activity on the search term and view the results from that period of time.

UPDATE: It seems that Google has now added Updates with images, and moved the Updates category right to the top of the list above News, so it’s not hidden in a drop-down menu.

Google Buzz Search

When you do the same search in Google Buzz, it pulls results in from all public Buzz posts. My “oil spill” search pulled up some interesting and relevant posts, but the search is obviously quite limited by just being internal to Buzz. Items that have been posted and commented on recently appear at the top of the results. Consequently, at the top you might see a post from a few days ago that there is still a conversation going on about right now.

At present, the results don’t appear to update in real time, you have to repeat the search to see newer results. Buzz seems useful as an addition to the previous Google search but not comprehensive, and I wouldn’t use it as my “go-to” source.

Twitter Search

Doing a Twitter Search results in tweets arriving in real-time. Or rather, the results are updated at the top of the page with a “x more results since you started searching” message, with a refresh button.

The results you get are most certainly recent, but as many people have commented, there tends to be a lot of noise. You get everything, not matter how trivial. This is  because the tweets and any contained links aren’t ranked in terms of popularity, or importance.

You can of course check Twitter Trending topics for what’s popular at any given time. However, anyone who uses Twitter regularly will know that there tends to be a lot of noise there too. As I write this, the top few trends are justin Jieber, firstdateturnoffs, #theuglyfriend, and #followquestion. These maybe fun for those participating but not incredibly useful for much else. If it’s really big news, it will usually trend though.

There has been talk of Twitter Search soon beginning to crawl the links that people tweet and indexing them, but that remains to be seen. This would add quite a bit of value, not to mention revenue opportunities for Twitter.

Tweetmeme

Tweetmeme tends to work well for slightly older items that have been retweeted a lot, and for that reason is quite a good addition to using Twitter Search. Twitter Search doesn’t go into how often content has been retweeted and Trending Topics only just scratches the surface of what is popular at any given time.

You can sort your results by Best Match, Highest Tweets and Age. None of these give any real indication of what’s rising in popularity “right now”, but using the combination of Highest Tweets from the “Last Day” should give a reasonable indication of what is currently popular.

Facebook Search

In terms of real-time search, when doing a search on Facebook you tend to get quite a few results you don’t want. The category “Posts by Everyone” seems the most relevant to the real-time cause. Given the recent outcry about Facebook changing users’ privacy without making it clear, no doubt many people don’t even know some of their posts in this section are searchable, but that’s another story.

You can further filter the results by Status Updates and Wall Posts only, or Links only, or Notes only. On the whole, I’m now surprising myself by saying the results actually appear to be a little more useful than Twitter for the information I’m searching for here.

Friendfeed Search

Last year Friendfeed was bought by Facebook, and I doubt there’s going to be too much more work done on it. It wouldn’t surprise me if it shut down completely at some stage. In terms of visitor numbers, it’s most certainly on the decline. The core team is now at Facebook, and that’s a great thing for Facebook in my opinion.

In terms of search, like Facebook and Google Buzz, your search can include posts from “All Friendfeed users”. At the present time, this tends to give a not too dissimilar result to Google Buzz. Although on the decline, users seem to have left their content feeding into Friendfeed, so there is still quite a big pool of content to search in.

The results are updated in real-time without having to hit any refresh button, and you tend to get results from quite a wide variety of sources which is good. Looking at it now, I’m getting posts and links flowing in from Twitter, Digg, The Huffington Post, New York Times and delicious. It’s not bad at all.

Scoopler

I’ve already stated in the opening that Scoopler is one of my current favourites. When the search results appear, you get a column of constantly updating tweets, or “What people are saying” on the right. The central column contains popular, relevant results from various sources. It’s just the kind of thing I’m looking for without having to sift through a lot of irrelevant noise and repetitive content. You can also break the results down into video, links or images results. The results also tell you how many times each item has been shared and how old it is.

With its mixture of live tweets coming in and other popular content, Scoopler gives me some really solid results for what I’m looking for. It’s presented in a way that’s pretty easy to follow.

One annoying feature is that when you click a link, it pops up as a window inside the existing window, instead of in a new window or browser tab. This is inconvenient if you want to keep a page open and go back to open more results, which often tends to be the case with me. The sharing options are good though.

Scoopler works by looking at what people are sharing across  services such as Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Flickr and more. A mix of algorithms, filters and optimizations are applied to continuously deliver the most up-to-date results, and it works well. Top Scoops is well worth a quick look while you’re there, as well as checking out some of the preselected categories.

OneRiot

As stated above, apart from Scoopler, OneRiot is my other favourite right now. I’ve found myself going there more often because it comes up with the results I’m looking for. It looks good, it works well, and it’s fast. The featured content also gets me hooked every time I go there.

As I said at the outset, it’s good because it tells you how many times each item has been shared, when each piece of content was last shared and even who it was first shared by. The sharing options aren’t as extensive as Scoopler but I don’t mind that, I tend to use external methods anyway.

Like Twitter Search, it updates as you search with the message “x new results from the real-time web”, along with a “Show” button. Each search includes a Featured Content section in the right column.

If you’re more interested in quality over real-time views, you can simply switch from “Realtime” to “Pulse” mode, which shows popular recent links about your query.

OneRiot describes itself as “the leading realtime web search engine, and the first network for advertising on the realtime web”. OneRiot says its search results are influenced by what people are sharing on Twitter, MySpace, Digg, Facebook and by their own panel of users. They say their search results reflect the real-time social buzz around any piece of content. This is achieved with OneRiot’s PulseRank algorithm – PageRank for the realtime web.

In addition, OneRiot’s self-serve ad marketplace, known as RiotWise, is aiming to help advertisers reach users across a range of real-time web services with relevant and very timely content. I’ll be interested to see how that goes. OneRiot recently posted an item called “How Big is the Realtime Advertising Market?” which makes for interesting reading. They assert that “with over 500 million users and growing fast, the realtime web represents one of the biggest underserved markets in history”

In any case, I’m currently using OneRiot on a regular basis, it’s pretty good.

Collecta

Collecta returns real-time search results from blog posts, blog comments, articles, Twitter, Jaiku, Identica, Flickr, TwitPic, yFrog, YouTube and Ustream. It continues to search as long as you keep the search open, and you can pause the search at will. There are good sharing options on anything you find, and it’s easy to open content in a new window.

It’s easy to switch various types of content on an off, depending on what you are looking for. If you leave them all on, which is the default, the results tend to be dominated by status updates. What I find a little unsatisfactory is the repetition of content in the Stories results, and I didn’t appear to get any results at all for Photos and Videos, which for a search like “oil spill” is not so great. Both Scoopler and OneRiot came up with a range of good image and video content.

Sency (Real-time Location Search)

Finally, here’s a new twist on real-time search. Launched just last month, Sency offers a service where you can search what’s being said “right now” inside of 14 cities in the US. I’m in Australia but I tried a search on “oil spill” to see what was being said in New York City. It would have been good to have been able to search in somewhere like New Orleans, but that’s not a city that’s available yet.

I can definitely see some benefits to being able to search for real-time content by location, and it’ll be interesting to see where this particular area leads, especially with location based services and features gaining momentum at the moment.

In Conclusion

Real-time web search hasn’t been around for long, it’s still early days. I’m sure there will be a lot of development in this space. What I find exciting about it is that I’m finding myself using and liking different search engines other than Google for the first time in the better part of a decade!

It remains to be seen whether Google will make an big effort to take over the space. In the meantime, to my mind, for those who participate in the real-time web on a regular basis, there are some really interesting and useful developments going on. Watch this space!

I have by no means covered all the services out there in terms of real-time search. Have you tried any others? Do you have a favourite from the ones I’ve compared or any other? Do you disagree with my views on any of the above services?

Technorati Tags: Buzz, Collecta, Facebook, Facebook search, Friendfeed, Google, Gulf, News, oil spill, OneRiot, real-time, Scoopler, search, Sency, Tweetmeme, Twitter, Twitter search