As people increasingly transmit and relay news over the web through services like Twitter, real-time search, which gives the ability to find a clear signal for breaking news among all the static, is becoming a focus.
Google introduced some time-based filters this week to address this. A “Show options” link at the top of results pages unveils a new sidebar when clicked.
Clicking on “Recent results” produces mentions from the past few minutes or hours. I tried looking up “Google outage” and got some recent relevant news on the fact that some Google services have been inaccessible today.
I have the impression such crashes are becoming more frequent and, sure enough, clicking on “Timeline”, produces a rising bar graph of stories on Google outages over the past few years.
Google has started including Twitter results and over on Twitter itself, #googlefail is a “trending topic” on its home page and clicking on this produces almost-real-time results of tweets from the last few seconds and minutes. As I read them, a message says 20 more results have come in since I started searching and it asks me to refresh the page.
Typing “Google outage” in OneRiot, a “real-time” search engine that launched this week, produces a mixture of headlines and stories referenced from tweets and Digg recommendations.
OneRiot says it crawls the links people share on social media services and filters out spam and duplicates. The service also shows who first shared a link and conversations around the link can be expanded.
OneRiot claims its rival Scoopler, which launched last week, just filters keywords and does not examine content in-depth, although it does a pretty fair job on “Google outage” with two columns separating out tweets and web stories. It is also the only search engine that updates in real time on the page, without a refresh needed.
TweetMeme, also launched this week, focuses on Twitter and presents links to stories that can be filtered by “best match”, “highest tweets” or the most recent.
All of these search engines are narrowing the gap between news happening and our reactions to it. In fact, on the web now, the reaction often comes first.
UPDATE: Thanks to @jedhallam on Twitter for reminding me about Twitterfall, a near real-time search filter for Twitter, and for pointing to Spezify, a dazzling drag-able visual search experience.
