Thursday, June 18, 2009

Real time search (what about Ranking?)

The number of real time search engines is increasing. Yesterday, two new engines joined the race. CrowdEye is from Ken Moss, who ran search engineering at Microsoft and built the new engine himself. Collecta is from Gerry Campbell, who was a search executive at AOL and Reuters, as well as an adviser to Summize (now Twitter Search). OneRiot who is run by Kimbal Musk and my old friend Alessio Signorini. Other engines are Topsy, Tweetmeme and Scoopler, not to mention Twitter Search itself.

This reminds me the old times when Excite, Lycos, Altavista and a lot of new-comers joined the search race -- back in 1997. Search is alive and kicking with new exciting stuffs to play with.

I would expect more and more academic publication on real time search problems, such as real time ranking.

4 comments:

  1. Hi, Antonio. There is a longer list of real-time search engines at

    http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2009/03/twitter-search-20-alternative-search-engines.html

    But even that list isn't complete. There are dozens of these things and more popping up every day. All are poorly differentiated, all built on top of a company, Twitter, which itself has no revenue model.

    Worst of all for those aspiring to be the new Google of real-time search, Google itself has been putting a fair amount of effort into near real-time indexing of new content (especially news) on the web.

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  2. Situation is pretty similar to 98, even if here there is the drug of too many people putting money

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  3. Another comparison list here:

    http://venturebeat.com/2009/06/20/who-rules-real-time-search-a-look-at-9-contenders/

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  4. That's very true, real time search is very important. We need to know right now what is going on and what people are saying about us. We launched surchur.com a year ago and we keep getting better and better with every passing month as we update according to customer feedback. Check us out at http://surchur.com

    Monika Lorincz
    monika at surchur.com
    http://surchur.com/
    Blog: http://blog.surchur.com/
    Twitter: @surchur

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