Real-time search is a hot topic right now – everyone seems to be fascinated with its abilities to spread news about swine flu much faster than swine flu itself. So it’s a good thing then that Twitter has finally completed its integration of its real-time search engine, which it acquired from Summize last year.
Now Twitterers have the ability to carry out real-time searches on their homepage, which they can then save, as well as having a glance at trending topics.
While Google may be in a strange position, as it currently lacks the ability to index real-time data on the web, there are other search engines out there that may be able to compete with Twitter’s search capabilities.
One such site is Collecta, which, as it constantly searches through and indexes sites such as Twitter, Flickr, WordPress and other blogs, image sites and so on, continually refreshes and tells users how many mentions their search term has received.
For now, Collecta has put out some samples of trending topics, including swine flu http://flu.collecta.com/, but the full site and API won’t be ready for release until some time in May.
By Marie Boran
