Real Time Search

A hot topic for 2009 is "real time search" and I'm sure we will hear more and more about this in the months to come. Now that the online community is making the transition to sites like Twitter it brings a component to search that we have not witnessed in the past(at least, not in this magnitude), it only stands to reason that the ability to search for real time info is coming along for the ride. It seems like the topic of real time search is popping up left and right and all of the major players have their own version of this "˜next step' in search.

Why "real time" search? Well, as the internet becomes a much more socialized community, people are looking for interesting and current content that was not traditionally found in real time when using a search engine. These new-school real time search engines are making an attempt to fill the void that traditional search engines have not been able to, and they are tackling this task by indexing these social media services in a matter of seconds.

As we have seen this week, Microsoft decided to make a run to compete with Google as they launched their Bing search portal, which I admit that like. But Microsoft didn't just stop there. For those of you that use IE8, you have an option for real time search that you might not be aware of. With IE8, you have more options to make add-ons to their browser (which also helps IE to compete with every SEOs browser of choice, Firefox). Microsoft has granted a real time search engine known as OneRiot to accompany their typical search results. After taking a test drive of OneRiot, it seems to do exactly what they claim: provide up to the minute results on any topic that has been discussed, tweeted, blogged, or reported about. And as an added bonus, the folks at OneRiot have added a video search to their portal.

We are entering the era when people are looking for up to date content, regardless of the topic. It is going to be very interesting to see how the other big players in search will adapt to this arena and grab their share of the market.