SEO Warrior

Real-Time Search

Theoretically speaking, real-time search across the Internet is virtually impossible. What is possible is collecting a subset of newly posted information across an array of sites and making this available relatively quickly.

For real-time search to be viable, it has to address many different factors but answer one basic question: what is relevant at this moment? The viability of real-time search relies on its heavy use of the social networking community sites as well as in designing algorithms to filter junk versus relevant, important content on the fly.

Nonetheless, live search seems to be the next big thing. Twitter already has “real-time” search capabilities from its acquisition of Summize. There are many up-and-coming real-time-search contenders, including Scoopler, OneRiot, Topsy, and TweetMeme, among others.

Twitter Real-Time Search

Twitter is the frontrunner when it comes to real-time search. Tweets are searchable instantly. If you create a page, Google does not index it until its crawler finds it. So, in that sense, Twitter has a head start when compared to Google.

When it comes to Twitter’s real-time search, tweet keyword relevancy is the top-ranking factor. Twitter uses a different kind of keyword matching when producing its search results. If you search for watching TV, you will get results that contain both terms.

Twitter search produces up to 1,500 tweet search results broken down to 15 tweets per page (as of this writing). Even the last search result out ...