What?s coming up in the world of IT: Real time search takes off

You’ve probably heard about the huge growth in social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, that allow people to keep in touch with each other and post details of their most menial daily activities. We’ll well now some enterprising businesses are trying to put this bottomless pit of user generated information to some good use, by developing what are called ?real time’ search engines. The idea is that, rather than present you will list of relevant web pages in response to your search in the way that Google traditionally does, a real time search engine will show you exactly what is happening now, based on what people are posting to twitter at this very moment for example.

Say, for instance, that you wanted to search for results to a football match as the game was in progress. You’d simply enter the name of your team in to the real time search engine, and it would show you the latest commentary and scores that had been posted by users. Of course, the reliability of the search would depend on the popularity of the event that you are searching for and how many people are posting details of it at the time. Two of our favourite real time search engines are OneRiot and TweetMeme, which you can try out using the links below:

http://www.oneriot.com/
http://tweetmeme.com/