Internet News

Tools for real time search

Top 25 Social Media Keyword Search Tools, Kristi Heines, Stay on Search (Aug 18)

Recommends several search engines for real time search results rom blogs, twitter, forums, facebook, and video

Topsy best for searching old tweets

Topsy: Now Searching Tweets Back To May 2008, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Aug 24)

"Looking for old tweets? Look to Topsy. The service has just expanded to have what it claims to be the largest searchable collection of past tweets, over 5 billion of them, stretching back to at least May 2008. That makes it more comprehensive than Google’s Twitter search or even Twitter’s own Twitter Search."

Danny Sullivan says that Topsy and Google are the only two search engines that will dig into the archives. Topsy has advanced search and syntax.

Google Real Time Search

Google opened a new specialty search engine for real-time search - http://www.google.com/realtime. The function is the same as that found under the Update option on the left panel of Google search.

Putting Google Realtime to Real-World Use, Tony Bradley, PCWorld (Aug 27)

Sees this as being most useful to companies for watching what is said about them and their products.

"The significance of monitoring real-time Facebook status updates and Twitter tweets is that it is raw, unfiltered information. When a customer has a bad experience at a restaurant, he is not shy about sharing that information with the Twitterverse. When someone really loves the movie she just saw, odds are fair that the Facebook social network will hear about it."

New Google Realtime Search with Realplay, Pandia (Aug 29)

"Google Realtime can also be used to research trends and retrace the development of a particular happening, let’s say a natural disaster or a political scandal."

Real time search tools

Top 5 real time search engines, Pandia (Aug 18)

The challenge to using social media for research is that it delivers more junk than useful information. Pandia describes five meta search tools that can help in sifting through to get what you want.

+ Collecta - a meta social search engine with a newspaper display
+ Topsy - meta search with many option for sorting and selecting
+ 48ers - similar but includes delicious.
+ Leapfish - regular web search and real time search - can be customized
+ Scoopler - strong search tool

+ Sency - does Twitter well.

New real time metasearch tool

Search Delicious, Twitter, Facebook and more — all in one tool, Pandia (Aug 8)

48ers - metasearch for real time search - in beta - worth trying.

Searching Twitter

Search Twitter like a pro, Pandia (Aug 8)

You don't have to go far to search Twitter - just use the Advanced search or use Twitter's query operators directly.

This article also points out 2lingual Twitter - two languages at the same time - federal governement researchers please take note; and Twitcaps for searching for images shared thru Twitter, Twitmatic for videos.

Commoncraft has done a video to introduce the novice to Twitter - Twitter Search in Plain English.

Finding Experts in Twitter

Topsy Launches Twitter Expert Search; Better Options Exist, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jul 15)

Topsy introduced a new feature to help people find tweeters to follow - the Topsy Expert Search. .

Search Engine Land wasn't impressed with results. It found - "The Topsy blog post says that results are ranked “based on influence and topical focus,” but it seems that may be measured by how often you mention certain words in your tweets and how often you get retweeted."

Instead, use the username search in Twitter - just enter name and Twitter will show Name Results for the name, and Real Time results. This assumes that you know the name of the expert you want to follow.

Another method that I like - use CloudLet to show names of authors in a tag cloud.

Real time image search

Real time image search, Pandia (June 8)

You might want a photo of that latest news story that turns up in real time search. Use Collecta or Nachophoto.

Twitter for breaking stories

Has Twitter become the king of topical search?, Brad McCarty, The Next Web (July 7)

The answer is Yes. Twitter now handles 800 million queries per day. "It seems that, for today’s Internet-savvy society, Twitter has become the breaking story venue of choice."

OneRiot has Facebook

OneRiot’s Realtime Search API Now Indexing Facebook Likes And Shared Content, Leena Rao, Techcrunch (Jun 18)

OneRiot, the real-time search engine, now picks up Facebook likes and dislikes to in addtion to Twitter, Digg and MySpace. That data is also in its API.

"Facebook likes and shares from users who have made their actions completely public will now contribute to the ranking of realtime search results available through OneRiot’s API. For example, a search for “World Cup” on OneRiot will reveal the most popular links about the soccer tournament being shared by Facebook users right now.

Google Real Time Search

Can Google Real Time Search Have Its Own Home Page Now? by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Jun 16)

The thing is Danny Sullivan says "Google’s Real Time Search is awesome" - and it should have it's own home page - just like video, images, and blogs do.

Instead we must do a search from Google Search and select Updates from the left rail - or Latest results from the refinements (not mentioned in article). Alternatively, search in Google Trends.

If Google does develop a search interface for real-time, I hope they take some notes from the Twitter advanced search.

Bing Social

Bing Social: Now Searching Facebook and Twitter, Research Buzz (Jun 10)

Bing Social is Bing's firehose of updates from Twitter and Facebook.

Myths about real-time

Myths, Realities & the Future of the Real-Time Web by Frederic Lardinois, Read Write Web (June 11)

Real-time search is getting serious. These are notes from a presentation done by Marshall Kirkpatrick about the myths, realities and the future of the real-time Web.

Forget entertainment - there is a scope - "In addition, he noted the enormous scope of the real-time Web, which ranges from finance and medical tools, to social networking and media services."

+ it's not just twitter and facebook - there are blogs and other social tools.
+ it won't rot your brain with overload (I'm not persuaded yet - I think there is overload)
+ real-time / social tools have been changing the ways we communicate.

See related articles at Read Write Web.

Collecta and One Riot

Collecta Scores More Funding for Real-Time Search, Curt Hopkins, Read Write Web (June 10)

Article tells us mroe about Collecta and its rival, One Riot, both strong tools for real-time search.

+ "the news it streamed from 15 million content sources was in fact less than a minute old,"

+ "Collecta is notable because it forms explicit partnerships with publishers, such as WordPress, and stream their content into the index in real time."

+ "OneRiot focuses more on P2P indexing with the use of their installed toolbar and indexing Twitter & Digg."

Social Media Search

6 Most Powerful Search Engines for Social Networks, by Steven Campbell, Make use Of (June 1)

There may be times you only want to seach social networks - check the buzz, find a person, get blog and microblog postings. Turn to search engines that search those sources.

+ SocialMention - comprehensive metasearch with alerting capalibity. Can get sentiment analysis on topics.

+ yoName - find the name and the networks where they are listed.

+ snitch.name - search popular networks, other tools, some academic and government.

+ Folowen - covers 27 social networking sites.

+ Samepoint - follow a conversation - get snippets and source.

+ Google Social Search - yes Google has a social search that will show in the left rail if you have developed your social contacts through GMail.

What's hot on Twitter

9 Websites To Show You The Hottest Stuff on Twitter Now, Nancy Messieh, Make Use Of (May 22)

If you follow trends and pop culture (mainly US), watching Twitter will be a full time job.

"In this article, we’ll take a look at search Twitter for the most popular stories by the number of retweets or favourites a tweet receives, as well as how to find specific kinds of interesting information on Twitter."

+ Tweetmeme - find retweeted blog posts, and stories.
+ DailyRT - rank most popular tweets of all types
+ Thoora - deeper analysis of popular stories
+ Favstar - "how many favourites any tweet has"

+ Micro.Vois - for the freelancer - "users looking for freelancer work, and users who are looking to hire freelancers"
+ TweetyJobs - job listings on Twitter - but the jobs are in the United States

+ TwitShop - for buying things
+ CheapTweet - finding tweeted deals - can search by category and keyword - but not country

+ WeAreHunted - popular music

Google's real-time work

Ultimate beginners guide to real time search by Kelvin Newman, SiteVisibility (May 26)

Google does real-time search in ways which we searchers might not fully appreciate. This article provides background on several initiatives.

+ Google Caffeine - faster spidering of blog content
+ PubSubHubBub - website pushes updates into the feeds rather than waiting for Google to scan
+ Query deserves freshness (QDF) - part of the ranking algorithm that will give priority to newness on topical questions as discerned from news coverage, blog coverage, and search volume. This has been in use since at least 2007.

Of course real-time is in search results now - most quickly viewed from Updates. It's more than Twitter - social media, Google News, Google Blog search.

Real time search with images

Google Adds Images To Real-Time Results, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (May 21)

Run the search at Google - oil spill - there will surely be results. Look to bottom of left rail for updates with images - there they are including a very sad looking pelican.

Posting lists tools that are specifically designed for real-time image search.

Using Real Time Search

Real Time Search User Behavior [pdf - 6 pages], by: Bernard Jansen (Penn St. Univ), Gerry Campbell (CEO, Collecta), Matthew Gregg, (Colleca_ (Apr 10) - paper presented at CHI 2010

Real Time Search receives a very careful look in this paper on user behaviour. Some points:

+ Searchers are dealing with the trivial. "Concerning search topics, the most used terms dealt with technology, entertainment, and politics, reflecting both the temporal nature of the queries and, perhaps, an early adopter user-based."

+ Searchers repeat their query over several days. It's a current awareness tool.

Good compact description of what real time search engines do

"Therefore, real time search engines (i.e., Collecta, OneRiot, CrowdEye, etc.)
employ different methods than the crawling used for conventional Web content. Real time search engines typically use some method of polling (i.e. they accept a query, send it to one or more social media platforms, retrieve and integrate the results). In this respect, real time search engines are similar to meta-search
engines. However, given the temporal nature of the content, many real time search engines do not index or store any content themselves. Additionally, as long as the query is active, real time content continues to flow into the engine in response to the query. Therefore, there is no static search engine results page generate with a set number of links."

Source: ResourceShelf posting.

One Riot Update

OneRiot nixes beta tag, gets a better trends engine, Josh Lowensohn, Web Crawler (May 7)

One Riot is an excellent tool for following real time postng. It has taken on a new look and an improved trends engine.

"This new engine takes the entire public data feed from social sites like Digg, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, and groups together what it considers to be emerging topics. These topics are then bunched together by relevancy, then ranked by the company's PulseRank algorithm. "

Ways to search Twitter

The Twitter Search Landscape, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (May 3)

Answers the question - "Who are the big players in Twitter search?". This should help SEOs figure out how to rank well and get traffic from Twitter. Danny Sullivan shows how editorial results are ranked and where the ads come from. The major search engines - Google, Yahoo and Bing are on the list, followed by many specialty twitter / real-time search engines.

Sentiment Analysis

Opinion Crawl – Web sentiment analysis, The Next Web (May 2)

Semantic Engines, creator of SenseBot for semantic search, has turned to opinion and sentiment analysis. OpinionCrawl.com - assesses Web sentiment on a subject – a person, an event, a company or product.

For oil spill it shows a pie chart of positive, negative, and neutral slices. (Hard to know how there can be 34% positive sentiment on that). Also a tag cloud of words - but no links. Get a a better idea of the analysis from Sarah Palin which shows trend in changing opinion.

Semantic Engines does not reveal sources or methods. This is likely a showcase for for-fee analysis they can do for your company. As a public tool, it's not as useful as working with Google Trends or some of the tools that analyze twitter streams.

CrowdEye has full twitter feed

CrowdEye Reloads With Entire Twitter Firehose, by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Apr 23)

Crowdeye, an excellent search engine for tweets, just got better.

"Real-time/Twitter search engine CrowdEye says it has “totally rebuilt” its site and is now using Twitter’s “Firehose” data feed. The site offers a handful of new features, most of which are available in the left-column of a CrowdEye search results page."

Google's Timeline for Real Time

Google has added a timeline view for its real-time results segment. It's minute by minute - and can be interesting to see a story develope.

To see this run a query on something current - eg iceland volcano eruption - click on Show Options - and then on Updates. That story had intense activity on April for most of the day until 6 pm (PDT for west coast).

Google Adds Twitter Timelines, Friend Recommendations, Research Buzz (Apr 15)

Google shows top links from Real Time results

Google’s Real Time Search Results Gets “Top Links” Section, by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Apr

Google has added top links to its real-time results. To see this, click on Show Options and then Updates - if there are results from real time (now includes Friend Feed as well as Twitter), top links in the posts will show on the right.

Wowd for Now(d)

Wowd - this might be a way to stay up to date with the latest across the usual categories: health, technology, business, entertainment, politics.

Wowd ranking is influenced by the activity of users of its Wowd browser application.

"Wowd search results don't rely on web crawlers or conventional page ranking. Instead, this is accomplished by taking into account pages preferred by people. Users who download the free Wowd browser application determine web page popularity by "nominating" public pages for inclusion, just by visiting them during their normal web surfing. No manual voting is required. Wowd uses an innovative distributed cloud architecture. "

Mentioned in Search engine Wowd – what’s going on Now, The Next Web (Apr 7)

Firehose of instant content

Making the real-time Web relevant, Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (Apr 5)

"Instant content" - that's a good phrase - so is "signal to noise ratio" - both belong to real-time search - the term usually used for looking at the fire-hose of postings from social media - another new term to represent all those places where people announce, jot down, opine and chatter.

And, it seems, it's all part of a trend to an explosion of content on the web - one that does show sentiment and maybe signficance - and one where there may be new agreements (or monopolies) for accessing that content.

Lots in this article.

"Search has been our gateway to the Web for almost as long as it has existed, and the big search players of the day are gearing up to handle a new challenge: how can the explosion of instant content produced by news organizations, blogs, and social-media users be organized in a relevant fashion, sorting through one of the worst signal-to-noise ratios in modern communication?"

Danny Sullivan sees real-time as mainly Twitter. Microsoft's Paul Yiu says there are " two components to real-time information: the actual content of the status update or post, and the link that is being shared within that update".

Major search engines watch for similar topics in spikes in search queries and Twitter feeds.

At Google --

"At that point, Google starts evaluating the relevance of its real-time content sources in order to determine what to surface in that box. Three things count: quality, or the spam-or-real question; the authority of the author of the content, determined by a PageRank-like algorithm that gets beyond mere follower counts to evaluate the quality of one's followers; and semantic evaluation, using Google's language data to filter status updates that may share characters but are unrelated ("gm cars" as distinct from "gm foods")."

Of interest:
""Yahoo's search deal with Microsoft does not include real-time indexing and ranking efforts

Twitter Syntax

Search Twitter with Twitter search operators, Wendy Boswell, Web Search About.com (Mar 26)

Twitter has search operators - of course quotation marks for word together, a near - but it is geographic - near Toronto, and most useful - search for tweets with links and a keyword - "arctic ice" filter:links

Finding the popular thru Twitter

The Most Influential Search Engine Of All Time., The Next Web (Mar 16)

More sentiment analysis of tweets. Rankspeed rates for excellent, cool, easy, powerful, secure, useful, and popular.

"RankSpeed is a search and ranking tool that helps you find the best websites and products by doing a sentiment analysis on the Twittersphere / blogosphere. It analyzes the data in social media to rank results by any item or query entered as a keyword, plus a sentiment about that item. I entered ’search engine’ as the keyword, ‘influential’ as the sentiment, and ‘all time’ as the time frame."

Whether you get anything on a search depends on what the twittersphere is talking about (good for celebs) - and then, whether you use it depends on your views about "crowd wisdom".

Following People on Twitter

How To Find The Right People To Follow On Twitter, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Mar 16)

If you want to see what other people are saying on Twitter, here are some ways to find people worth following.

"Still, whether you’re looking for friends, strangers or companies to follow, it’s never been an easy task. Beyond Twitter’s suggestions, there are search engines, directories, tools, and lists that can help. Here are some of our favorite ways to find the right people to follow on Twitter."

Google Real Time Ignored

Why do we ignore 'real-time' results from Google search?, Charles Arthur, Guardian (Mar 9)

Do searchers even notice the real-time results at Google, Bing, and Yahoo? They aren't that easy to see.

"Users ignore "real time" results in searches. That's the conclusion of some eye-tracking studies carried out on people doing usability studies with Google results, and it might not be good news for Twitter - which has done deals with Google and Bing to let them index its content and serve it up in the results for searches. Google is reckoned to be paying $15m, and Bing $10m - though the length of the deal isn't known."

And there is the other question - are they even useful? They can be for news now.

"When you're trying to find out about breaking news that affects you, they'll definitely look damn useful - for instance, if you've heard about a natural or other disaster at a location where you know a relative is living or visiting, you'll want to search and find out what's happening. "

The article doesn't say this - but there are many better places to look. Twitter itself, OneRiot, Collecta and others.

Twitter's Full Feed and Collecta

Twitter will be delivering full-on feeds of all those tweets (estimated at 50 million a day) to Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn Search - in addition to whatever it sends to bing, Google, and Yahoo.

Twitter Adds Small Companies to Public Feed, PC Magazine (Mar 3)

Looking at Collecta - as Charles Knight does - what's in it for seachers? You wouldn't want to get the blast without some filters and pressure controls. Also, you don't want to have to check in several places for real-time.

Why should you care if a search engine has access to the Twitter firehose., Charles Knight, The Next Web (Mar 4)

Collecta has "adaptive filtering" which it applies to all things real-time.

"Our goal is to have everything on the web that is happening right now. not just Twitter, not just social networks in general. Not even social networks and blogs. We have ten million sites that include traditional news, video, images social messages, blog posts, blog comments… Everything imaginable. And we’re growing that all of the time.

Why? Because that piece of information you want may be anywhere. And that story you’re following may evolve outside one single venue. I can guarantee it probably does."

I hope the Federal Conservative Government is watching the stream on proposed changes to the Canadian anthem - basic message - find something better to do.

Google doing real-time indexing?

Google To Begin Indexing The Internet In Real-Time? by Alex Wilhelm, The Next Web (March 4)

Is real-time indexing a good thing?

"In a move that might rewrite the entire search market, Google is rumored to be creating a system that will let allow web publishers to submit content to Google for search indexing in real-time."

It's a kind of PubSubHubBub for moving syndicated content quickly online and into the readers.

"This move by Google, if it comes to fruition, would be a super-PubSubHubBub, not just moving your content into Google Reader at light speed, but also into the hands of the tens of millions of people searching Google every few hours. It would be a bigger move towards a real-time web than Twitter will ever be."

Google Index to Go Real Time , Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb (Mar 3)

Apparently there are significant benefits.

"PuSH is much more computationally efficient for Google but Slatkin says that even more important is the impact of such a move for small publishers. Right now many small sites get visited by Google maybe once a week. With a PuSH system in place, they would be able to get their content to Google automatically right away.

A richer, faster, more efficient internet would be good for everyone, but the benefits in search wouldn't be limited to Google, either. The PubSubHubbub is an open protocol and the feeds would be as visible to Yahoo and Bing as they would be to Google."

Real Time Social with Buzzzy

Searching Google Buzz and More, ResearchBuzz (Feb 25)

Buzzzy.com was quick off the mark - it searches Google Buzz, Twitter, Google Reader, Friendfeed, Mobile, Picasa and a whole bunch more. Get your real-time fix here.

More Twitter for Yahoo

Yahoo turns on the Twitter firehose, Tom Krazit, Webware (Feb 23)

Yahoo will be getting a direct stream from Twitter - this will augment the real time items in the News blocks that turn up in web search results - and be an option for Yahoo account users to add twitter feeds to their profiles

"The battle is on to see if search engines can analyze, rank, and display real-time data from services like Twitter in a relevant way. It's early days so far, but this could be the next battleground in the search market now that everyone is trying to augment search results with structured data."

See Twitter and Yahoo Team Up, ResearchBuzz

Tara Calishain has some details on what you will see - and concludes - "Simply integrating a tweet stream into search isn’t enough. Especially for Yahoo, it isn’t enough. I have faith that Yahoo can do more".

Try for yourself on a search for something topical - this week it is Toyota recall.

Getting the Web Buzz

Where to go to find what’s hot on the Web, The Next Web (Feb 17)

1) Why be interested in real-time at all? Charles Knight points to Why Right Now is a Big Thing: 5 Users Who Care About Real Time Search (April 13, 2009) - only the "brand manager" has to do with real work - others are curiousity, ego, and getting ideas (a good reason).

2) Sources to use to find out current popular topics and keywords.

+ Google Trends
+ Twitter trending topics
+ Yahoo Buzz
+ Bing XRank

+ The Surchur real time board - a metasearch of trend trackers including the four above.

Warning - most buzz is about celebrities and news stories in the United States. Today, of course, it's Tiger Woods and many Winter Olympics events.

Internet Librarian 2009 Presentations on Search

Internet Librarian 2009 - Information Discovery and Search

It is never too late to blog something. The Internet Librarian site has three presentations on aspects of search.

+ WebSearch Review by Chris Sherman - Down to 4 search engines, cool Bing, Wolfram Alpha, "Real Time" search follies and Twitter Twaddle, the Targetting Trend. Finally, some one who says social search is a fad.

+ Super Searcher Shares Search Tips Spectacular by Mary Ellen Bates

+ Digging for Gold with Social Media Tools by Samara Omundson and Emily Wheeler. Evaluating social media tools for their usefulness in obtaining information on a current interest (product, issue etc).

Tweeting from Haiti

Tweets from the banks of hell by Lisan Jutras, Globe and Mail (Jan 24)

Twitter lines were humming with stories out of Haiti. Some of these stories are mentioned in this article.

"These messages, like telegrams from the banks of the River Styx, showed up in my Twitter feed in the days after the Haiti earthquake. Originally posted to the micro-blogging site from journalists and Haitians on the ground in the ruined city, they were re-tweeted into wide circulation. Not coincidentally, the public’s response, largely through online and SMS donations, was tremendous."

Very first hand, very human.

Seesmic Look app

A Twitter app for nOObs , Wesley Fok, Globe and Mail (Jan )

nOOBs = newbies (I think)

This is a favourable review of Seesmic Look for following Twitter - probably best used people new to the Twitter phenomenon.

"Unlike most Twitter clients, Seesmic Look downplays the social and interactive aspects of the service, choosing instead to focus on the content other users post to Twitter."

However, Seesmic Look is an app that has to be downloaded and installed.

Tweeters who are analysts

Top analyst tweeters (via TweetLevel), Technobabble (Jan 19)

Tweetlevel measures a person's influence on Twitter taking in influence, popularity, engagement, and trust. This article looks at the technology analysts who turn up. You might find some you'd like to follow - there are 500 listed and rated here. Article mentions other tools for measuring influence of twitterers.

Twitter Locality

Twitter adds local trends to Web site, by Rafe Needleman, Cnet News (Jan 26)

Twitter now has an option in the right-hand navigation bar, under "Trending," for selecting a geographic region to see what's hot on Twitter in one of a few cities. Twitter will show a box asking you to select your locality. At present there are 15 US cities, and 5 non-US countries: Canada, Brazil, Ireland, Uk, and Mexico.

What can you get from Real Time Web?

The real time web — what’s in it for you?, Evan Britton, Pandia (Jan 21)

What can you get from real time search? Information, says Evan Britton. "You can find out what is being said right now about any particluar subject. If you want to see what people think about a sports event, movie, celebrity, or any other breaking news - a real time search will inform you."

Seesmic Look

Seesmic makes Twitter pretty, with Look by Rafe Needleman, CNET (Jan 21)

Don't need to be a Twitter user to follow tweets with Look from Seismic. This is a Windows application

"Look, a new product designed for the Twitter watcher much more than the Twitter contributor or participant. The app lets you scan the feeds of popular Twitter celebrities, or show feeds for specific topics, like the NFL or Wall Street business. It can display tweets as they come in, or it can go into "playback" mode to let you catch up on what you missed."

From Look description page - "Seesmic Look is a unique way to immerse yourself in the real-time web. Optimized for Windows 7, this innovative interface allows you to feel the pulse of millions of users or be inspired by individuals of your specific interest. Beginners learning to understand real-time can stay engaged and connected without even logging into Twitter, while experienced users can take advantage of Look's powerful features in creative and imaginative ways."

Finding Older Tweets

Where Have All The Old Tweets Gone? by Danny Sulllivan, Search Engine Land (Jan 14)

People are tweeting so much that Twitter can't handle the search volume and can't retrieve tweets older than a week. Danny Sullivan offers some work-arounds. One is to use a site search at Google - site:twitter.com - and there are ways to limit the query. The same can be done at Bing and Yahoo, although their indexes are smaller.

FriendFeed is another method if you use it and have been importing your tweets.

Ranking Tweets at Google

How Google Ranks Tweets, by David Talbot, Technology Review (Jan 13)

It's mainly about reputation.

"A fundamental Google strategy for identifying tweet relevance is analogous to that used by Google's PageRank technology, which helps find relevant Web pages with traditional Web search. Under PageRank, Google judges the importance of pages containing a given search keyword in part by looking at the pages' link structure. The more pages that link to a page--and the more pages linking to the linkers--the more relevant the original page."

Twitter Clout

Got Twitter Clout? Here's How to Find out., Kristin Burnham, CIO - PCWorld (Jan 17)

Measuring clout on Twitter --

"How influential are you on Twitter? That's what several sites are now promising to judge, labeling you by doing everything from calculating your "social capital" to knocking you for a "low Twitter efficiency."

These Twitter ranking sites vary in how calculations are made--some basic sites rely solely on the number of tweets, retweets and followers, while others use more complicated algorithms to determine results."

Listimonkey for Twitter Lists

Monitor Twitter Lists with ListiMonkey, Research Buzz (Jan 18)

Recommends ListiMonkey for "information trapping"

"ListiMonkey at http://listimonkey.com/. ListiMonkey allows you to specify a Twitter list, enter the keywords for which you want to monitor that list, and then specify an e-mail address to which you want to get the results, and how often you want to get the results (hourly or daily)."

See full posting.

Twiangulate for exploring Twitter space

Who’s Following Who on Twitter? Twiangulate Will Tell You, ResearchBuzz (Jan 14)

Tells us why Twitter tools are important - "great source to monitor for information and links. And there are some amazing people out there holding useful conversations."

Twiangluate - "lets you enter two or three Twitter users and find common followers between them."

TipTop Charts

Sentiment, Social Media & Twitter Trends, Altsearchengines (Jan 10)

TipTop produces charts on "sentiment" trends.

More from Searchtastic

Searchtastic - a new Twitter Search engine added two features.

* Export tweets to Excel. After doing a search, just click the Excel icon.

* Expand shortened URLs within tweets into full links.

Twitter Search Engines

10 Twitter Powered Search Engines, Manoj Jasra, Web Analytics (Jan 5)

Identifies 10 search engines for tweets.

+ Twitterment
+ Twitscoop
+ Topsy
+ One Riot
+ Twazzup
+ Scoopler
+ Collecta
+ Buzzom
+ Twellow

Word Order in Search

Doing Real Time Search? Watch Your Word Order, Research Buzz (Jan 13)

Word order makes a difference at the web search engines - they will rank results that have the order you have used more rarely - hence the advice to use natural phrasing. This applies to real time search as well, as Tara Calishain demonstrates. To be really sure, run a variety of searches.

Good advice in last paragraph: "I remember being astonished when search engines hit a billion pages of indexed content, but that’s nothing these days. The name of the game continues to be narrowing down your results to get the information you need and approaching a search problem from different angles. You can make a different angle just from changing the word order in your query even in Google’s real-time search; try it!"

Tracking Tweets

Serious Information Trapping on Twitter with RowFeeder, Research Buzz (Jan 13)

RowFeeder is a for-fee service for tracking terms or hashtags on Twitter. There is an example in the posting and at the RowFeeder site.

Red Panda for reading news

Special Report: Introducing Red Panda, Altsearchengines (Dec 28)

Red Panda - "real-time discovery engine" - looks interesting.

Red Panda is a browser for news and information but it comes as an extension to the Firefox browser. It promises to cut information load by understanding what you want and gathering it for you.

"Reconciling this information overload requires a three-face solution: universality (reaching all sources), immediacy (consistent updating) and finally accuracy (results pertaining to the current interests of the users). Red Panda has been designed specifically to address all these requirements, and in so doing succeeds as a true democratized news reader."

Watch the video to see the interface. Looks like something to try.

Available in English and French.

2009 gave us Real Time

5 Big Real-Time Web Trends of 2009 by Samuel Axon, Mashable (Dec 27)

2009 was the year for the real-time web thanks largely to Twitter.

+ Google real-time results

+ Aggregating news as it happens thanks to the new protocol pubsubhubbub developed by Google. "It creates a hub that receives updates in real-time from the content host and immediately pushes those updates out to subscribers. The benefit: published items from websites the instant they’re posted, not several minutes later."

+ Real-time social: Facebook and Friendfeed - after acquiring FriendFeed, Facebook is as real-time as Twitter. "Not only will users be able to stay connected to their friends at a second’s notice, they’ll also be able to use Facebook as a resource to tap the zeitgeist for insight just like they already could on Twitter."

+ Real-time on the Go: Cuil and BNO News - these are real-time iPhone apps - "Cuil, the app for the search engine founded by two Google alums, and BNO News, a breaking news app with push notifications. The former gives streaming search results that you can flip through like cards as they come. The latter sends you push notifications the instant major news stories hit."

+ Collaboration without delay: Google Wave - it's early yet but Google Wave applications could make email real-time.

Finding Twitter Lists

A Resource for Twitter Lists, ResearchBuzz (Dec 22)

Tweetdeck has thousands of lists categorized into nine main areas. Browsing is easy - and recommended.

But the list - "Information for each list includes the number of accounts that the list follows, the number of accounts that follow the list, and the average number of tweets per day. There’s also a few tags/words associated with the listing." - But you don't see a sample, You can Add the list, then log into Twitter and click on the user name to view tweets.

It would probably be a good idea to read the Features page

Use Google News

Goofing Around: Google and The Real-Time Web, ResearchBuzz (Dec 21)

Once fresh meant a week or so in a search engine, now it means an hour or less. This post describes how and where Google shows real-time search results now in its "universal" results. There are concerns - Tara Calashain points to the danger of mal-links coming in from Twitter.

Her conclusion: Use Google News for the latest news - it will be more reliable.

Status Updates at Bing and Google (or not)

Google & Bing’s Unequal Facebook Status Update Deals by Danny Sulllivan, Search Engine Land (Dec 16)

Blow by blow account of the history of Bing and Google in bringing in status updates (the term now used for microblogging).

Why should we care? "Updates often contain great content, such as information that doesn’t exist anywhere else on the web or which can be mined to see the popular links that are being shared. Having updates is essential for anyone who wants to run a real time search service. And when it comes to status update content, Twitter and Facebook have more of it than anyone else."

Google and Bing might be even on Twitter now, but Danny Sullivan says Google lags at Facebook.

"Google is only getting information from fan pages. Those millions of people on Facebook putting out updates via personal pages? Google’s not getting any of that."

Bing does et the personal updates that are public. But they aren't integrated with search results. So where are they? And Google, which supposedly gets the fan updates, doesn't include them in the real-time search.

It will all sort out someday.

SEO and Real-Time Search

What Google's Real-Time Search Means to SEO, PPC & Reputation Management by Chris Crum, WebProNews (Dec 13)

Some interesting points about real time in web search results:

+ Dave Snyder at Search Engine Journal. "... The first thing that came to mind when I saw the real time search data pouring through was that Google is getting a massive amount of real time link data without the issue of a crawl. I am convinced they will be utilizing this data to help shape SERPs for terms that are trending or based on timeliness."

+ Marissa Mayer of Google said that Google is working on algorithms to detect signals that can be used to "reveal authority".

+ There are ways to place well in real-time search results - keywords, currency, relevancy, have followers, connect to social media.

+ Companies will have to watch real-time search to see what is being said about them and their products - another matter of reputation management.

Google's Update Rank for Real Time Results

How Google Real-Time Results are Ranked – The First Draft, Ross Dunn, Stepforth (Dec 8)

This posting examines how Google may be evaluating and ranking real-time results. Authoritativeness is the key concept - to weed out spam and evaluate tweeters based on the quality of their followers and related activity. Update Rank is the likely name for the ranking algorithm, as Page Rank has been for web sites.

Real Time at Yahoo

Yahoo joins the real-time search parade, by Tom Krazit, Webware (Dec 10)

One more into the pool for delivering real-time entries.

"Yahoo will join Google witih integrated results as of Thursday, said Larry Cornett, vice president of product management and design at the company. But in a crucial difference between the two approaches, Yahoo has not cut a deal with Twitter for access to the "firehose," an automated feed of data from Twitter. Instead, it's using Twitter's public API and adding its own algorithms to figure out which tweets are most relevant to the query."

Tom Krazit remarks - "The thorniest problem with real-time search is relevancy. " I'd say.

For news items, Yahoo will show a Twitter tab in its news shortcut - if it finds something

On this search on copenhagen climate conference Yahoo had no tweets though Google had several. Of course, there was a tab for Tiger Woods.

My thoughts - if you know you want real-time comments on a current event, an issue, a person, a place - it makes more sense to use one of the social media metasearch engines, to go to twitter and facebook directly, or research the topic to find out who to follow. If there is any value to having this in web search results at Yahoo or Google it is just as a reminder to consider those sources.

Real Time at Google

Search & Real Time Madness, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Dec 10)

Real time streams from Twitter, Facebook etc seem to be disturbing search. Google, Yahoo, and Bing are all on this bandwagon - inserting these tweets into search results whether we want them or not. Danny Sullivan discusses several aspects.

+ spam - of course this can be exploited by spammers
+ news vs real time - really, what's the difference?
+ is Google going to pay Twitter and others for those streams? If so, why not pay for news too?

Real Time in Google

Google Launches Real Time Search by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land ( Dec 7)

Google has added real-time feeds to its search results. This will show as Latest results for among other web search results - probably a few items down the page. New items scroll down in a small panel. Frankly, I'd prefer if Google had placed this in a place on the page separate from other results.

This only shows when Google detects a real-time component to the query and finds relevant results.

It gets its information from:

* Tweets from Twitter
* Content from Google News
* Content from Google Blog Search
* Newly created web pages
* Freshly updated web pages
* FriendFeed update
* Jaiku updates
* Identi.ca updates
* TwitArmy updates

Latest results show on Google.com for climate change , but not, as far as I can see, on Google.ca even though Identi.ca is one of the sources.

It is also possible to view the real time feed from the Show Options as Updates under All Results, or Latest under Any Time.

There is a real-time component to Google Trends as well - the Hot Topics column on the left of the page.

For Power Tweeters

TweetDeck links in retweets, Twitter lists, maps by Jessica Dolcourt, Webware (Nov 30)

Tweetdeck is a desktop application for "power tweeters" whereby they can easily share tweets, manage Twitter lists, see geolocation information on a map, and pull in social networks.

"Adding and expanding on Twitter features isn't TweetDeck's only move. The update also pulls the LinkedIn social network onboard, which means you can now read status streams from LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace in TweetDeck's column view, in addition to tracking streams from various Twitter accounts."

Introduction to Real Time Search

Search Engines: Real-time Search by Phil Bradley, Ariadne (Oct 2009)

Examines real time search - definiton, nature, examples, search tools - and what the "standard" web search engines are doing. Good overview.

Pandia Reviews Leapfish

Search the real time web with LeapFish, Pandia (Nov 10)

Pandia describes the new LeapFish search engine as "A multi-media and real-time search, communication, and sharing platform. " To the question "is it any good?", Pandia says yes - "LeapFish has real time results from a large number of sources, including multimedia. The results are relevant and easy to navigate." So - good for real time, less so for "standard web"

Real-Time Local Search

Why I’m NOT Drinking The “Real-time Local Search” Kool-Aid, David Ingram, Search Engine Land (Nov 12)

David Ingram does bring some structure to this matter of real time local search - when would you need it?

"To be truthful, my sense is that there are relatively few categories of business for which Real-Time Local Search may be very important, but let’s not allow my gut-feel to confuse the picture. There are some smart, creative businesses out there that can take a non-time-sensitive business and make it time-sensitive to great effect."

A CBC program had a story about Taco trucks in Los Angeles sending out tweets on their location so that the many taco eaters could find them - or wait for them. Guess that's an application for real-time local search.

LeapFish in Real Time

Real-Time Search Engine LeapFish Leaps into the “Living Web”, Altsearchengines (Nov 5)

Leapfish, which made a splash a while back for searching while you typed, has "unveiled the new multi-media and real-time search, communication, and sharing platform that gives consumers the most convenient, fun, and personalized way to experience and share the traditional and real-time Web – the new “Living Web”."

The idea is to search - and share - in a single interface.

Searching takes in real-times sources (Twitter, Youtube, Twitpic, Flickr) and multimedia. Web results come from Google, Yahoo or Bing - you choose.

The home page can be customized. There is a connection with Facebook. This will mesh (somehow) with your online social circles.

All in all, it looks like a portal with many sources and a display that tries to show something of everything.

But it's main claim is tapping into real-time conversations in the networks.

In the blog posting , Real-Time Search: 5 Reasons Why “We” Will Change the Web, Oct 26, the media team described the real-time purpose that is driving this new design.

"If there existed a search engine that was capable of aggregating and rendering results based on what was shared, peoples opinions and conversations, would you be interested in that search engine? If you knew that there were 6 conversations that provided a fantastic account of a design firm you were considering would that be more valuable to you than the top 3 links on your current search engine results? Would you have more value for SEO based search results or human conversation driven results? How about both? Real-Time search, once developed, will render a new breed of search engines that will capture this new value the New Web has to offer."

Yahoo Into Real Time

Yahoo Confirms Real-Time Search Test by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Nov 3)

"Yahoo will run a test “in the coming days” with OneRiot, a real-time search engine that focuses on links and content from Twitter and other social media sources."

Bing Twitter Delay

Bing fiascos continue, Phil Bradley's weblog (Oct 24)

There are some flaws to Bing that we might not notice. But Phil Bradley has documented instances in which Bing "censors" the results.

So, it may not be a huge surprise, that Bing's new search of Twitter is less than up to the minute.

Creating Twitter Lists

Twitter tests lists, Pandia (Oct 18)

Here's something to think about - "If you subscribe to the most knowledgeable twitterers in your field, you will get access to top news you didn’t know you should have searched for."

A new Twitter feature lets you sort the people you follow into topics. Pandia points to its own Search Engine Intelligence list.

Postscript: ResearchBuzz on First Look: Twitter Lists (Nov 2)

More on how to create, use, and find Twitter lists.

Tweets in Bing and Google

Google strikes a Twitter search deal, too by Caroline McCarthy and Tom Krazit, Webware (Oct 21)

I suppose this was inevitable. Both Bing and Google are going to be indexing Tweets. Bing has started with a new Twitter search, and Google will be receiving a data feed from Twitter. Don't know yet what it will look like.

"How will it be presented? Google isn't ready to talk about that yet in detail, but Wright said tweets would be presented within regular search results. "Relevancy is paramount," Menzel said, but it's also tricky: sometimes you might want the result from the guy with only 30 followers who knows what's happening on a given street corner, sometimes you might want the industry expert's quick take on a product announcement."

Next step may be including Facebook.

Bing's display of tweets is described in Hands-on with Twitterized Bing

"Bing has the opportunity to leverage its well-developed search engine chops to address this--not only will public tweets will show up in search results, Bing can rank results based on relevance of the post, the popularity of the writer, and other, more complex factors."

This is a new twitter search engine - not part of the web search. At present www.bing.com/twitter only works in the US.

Danny Sullivan provides a very complete description of Bing Twitter Search - Up Close With Bing’s Twitter Search Engine

How to Search Twitter

How to find treasures and search Twitter effectively, Felix at Search1.x - in Altsearchengines (Oct 19)

Lots of tips on how to search Twitter with better result.s

"Just like Google’s search, Twitter offers advanced search functionalities that can really help you find what you are looking for and filter out all the trash. Also, due to the real-time and conversational nature of twitter, there are some unique search operators you need to be aware of in order to search twitter effectively."

Twitter feeds to Google and Bing?

How Will Twitter Integration Into Google, Bing Affect The Tweecosystem? by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Oct 9)

It has been rumoured that Google and Bing will get their search hands on the Twitter feed. What will this do to all the specialized Twitter search engines? And what will it do to Web search?

"Bing previously added “Twitter Smart Answers.” There are also third party tools to add Twitter results to both Google and Bing. And as you know Google’s relatively new search options allows people to filter by results from the “past hour.”"

Five New Twitter Search Tools

Five More Search Tools You Should Know: Twitter Edition, by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land

This is a roundup of new Twitter search tools. The ingenuity and inventiveness in creating these tools is quite remarkable. There are some winners on this list - especially the job search.

"You’ll learn how to search the bios of other Twitter users, how to search deeper into Twitter’s archives, and how to find jobs advertised on Twitter. But first, an interesting Twitter search tool with potentially serious local search implications."

Schmap - trending restaurants and bars - in 13 cities at present, 11 in the US plus London UK and Sydney, Au

Areaface - enter a search term and click a locality on the map to see what is being said on that topic. Works for Canada and the US. Zoom in to find the exact city or town.

Twitter Job Search - good for around the world. Can view a map or browse job categories. Has a blog with articles and advice as well.

Searchtastic - "archival" search of tweets.

Tweepsearch - searches bios of Twitter users to find those who match on keywords you enter. Great way to find users to follow for your topical interest. Use quotation marks to pick up phrases; eg "web search"

Searchtastic for old tweets

Twitter search engine #87 – Searchtastic, Altsearchengines (Oct 12)

Searchtastic will search tweets from beyond Twitter's limit of 7 days. They call this "historical".

It's amusing to look at the top 100 Twitter users: a lot of showbiz and several celebrities, some news sources (Time, NYTimes, BBC), US pollitics, a couple of sports, and one environment - if you count Al Gore.

Going Beyond Twitter for Real Time Search

Real-Time Search Is Much Bigger Than Just Twitter , Rob Garner, Search Insider (Sep 16)

Argues that real-time search is more than Twitter. It's more about getting new content and status updates.

"Make no mistake about it, crawler-based real-time search and status-update search are both important to the successful development of a state-of-the-art robust and relevant real-time search engine. "

Key paragraph:

"Real-time search is an entirely different animal from its two main components, "traditional" crawler search, and keyword discovery via social streams. The end goal in "real-time" search is about getting the best results now or within a recent period of time, versus getting the best results over history. It is entirely different from the keyword monitoring of a social stream for discovery, and is also different from fresh, crawler-based results, even if they are delivered within a shorter timeframe. Perhaps the most unique aspects of real-time search (in its current incarnation) are that they are keyword-triggered, viewed in reverse chronological order (or other recency parameters), and that many of the best results are collated by a human audience. These attributes ultimately differentiate it from either typical keyword-triggered stream view, or keyword search in your favorite search box. "

Living Real Time

Live: Real Time Search: Opportunity Or Hype?, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable (Oct 9)

Barry Schwartz lives real time as he blogged from the SMX East conference session - Real Time Search: Opportunity Or Hype? As he "live blogged" the event, he inserted real-time tweets about the session. It's like being on Speed. many good tools are mentioned and get quick comments.

OneRiot's Featured Content

OneRiot aims to make money from Twitter search by Rafe Needleman, Webware (Oct 5)

OneRiot, a real-time Twitter search engine, has a feature for companies to push their content called RiotWise.

Needleman explains, "Say you're doing a OneRiot search for "Paris." Instead of seeing ads for airfares and hotels, as you would on Google, you'll see instead links to "Featured Content" about Paris from content producers -- news sites, blogs, and online magazines."

The premise is that the content piece will have the advertisements - more people click on the page with the content, the more they'll see the ads.

"Essentially it's an arbitrage model: Musk is asking publishers, who are paid by advertisers, to themselves pay for advertising on OneRiot to get more traffic, thus increasing their revenue yield per page."

This could develop into a new model.

Trendsmap Mashup

Trendsmap maps Twitter trends in real-time by Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Sep 21)

Talk about a mashup! Trendsmap "tracks trending Twitter topics by geographical location by combining data from Twitter's API and What The Trend. It then sticks it onto a Google Map where users can sort by city or general region and see trending topics in real time."

Labels fill the map like a tag cloud - useful - but will block out topics that have less activity - and areas with less activity. Canadians will want to use the Zoom In button to get detail north of the border.

Aggregating Tweeters

Get the Line on Journalists Using Twitter, ResearchBuzz (Sep 14)

Muck Rack aggregates tweets by and for journalists.

"The tabs slice and dice these lists of journalists, as well as organize their multimedia and links. The tabs will let you look at the latest as well as the most popular links that the journalists are posting. You can look at individual journalists by beat or look at a whole tweetstream of that beat. (Beats include health, environment, sports, and several metro areas."

Left panel has the beats and the sources. Sources include a wide variety of types including a couple from the UK but none from Canada.

There are some other groupings - such as travel, science, designers.

Google Indexing

Real time indexing in Google, Pandia (Sept 17)

Article describes in simple terms Google's indexing practices - it aims to be fresh but it doesn't follow tweets. Twitter might do this - indexing the pages that the tweets point to - making it truly a real time engine.

"How often Google revisits a site is dependent on its popularity, authority (i.e. to what extent other “good” sites link to it) and its updating frequency."

News has its own index, and Blog search pulls in RSS feeds. Google Search "will contain a mix of search results, some from traditional web search, some from news search and some from blog search, all powered by different indexing systems."

POV on real time search

Real-Time Search – Part 1, Borislav Agapiev, Altsearchengine (Sept 19)

At the moment (real time) I think real time search is overrated - and more importantly, the perceived need for real time search is over hyped. Granted it would be good to get latest updates from news sources and blogs, but this constant attention to real time may be misguided.

However, here is Borislav Agapiev, founder of Wowd (in private beta) discussing the purpose and challenges.

"The problem with most real-time search mechanisms has to do with comprehensiveness: in order to achieve fast performance, existing real-time search systems are limited to an extremely small set of web sites. The tension between real-time response and comprehensive coverage requires a new way of thinking about the entire architecture of search."

Ranking at One Riot

Ranking Algorithm for the Realtime Web: OneRiot “Pulse Rank” Update Kimbal Musk, One Riot (Sept 14)

CEO Kimbal Musk of OneRiot announced some changes to the ranking algorithm at this real time search engine and its ranking algorithm.

Factors considered by PulseRank are freshness, domain authority, people authority, and acceleration in links (number of link-tos in a period - measure of how "hot" the item is).

You might try it for Canadian election. . On Sept 14, this search had reasonably good results from Canadian newspapers dated Sept 13 and 14. But they might not have been complete. A search at Twitter offered up a couple of others and a particulary good posting by Connie Crosby on the Canadian Election Controversy

One Riot says it "crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services, then indexes the content on those pages in seconds. The end result is a search experience that allows users to find the freshest, most socially-relevant content from across the realtime web."

It may do that, but if you really are combing through real time entries, use more than one tool.

Real Time Search at Google

Near-Real-time search on Google?, Altsearchengines (Sept 13)

Google can help you find new pages on the Web - right down to the last minute - through Search Options. One of the time periods is 24 hours but you can hack the url to change the period.

"Notice the URL parameter qdr:d. I assume qdr stands for Query Date Range (sounds about right). All you have to do to search for the query in the past minute is to change the parameter to qdr:n, and for the past second to qdr:s."

This does work but the qdr is not always in exactly that format, and it is fiddly work to change the values. [m=month, d=day, n=minute, s=second]

Results for the short time frame come mainly (entirely?) from Google News.

RankSpeed and Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis of blogs and tweets is becoming the in-thing for search. RankSpeed is a new tool that claims to track 3 million websites and pick up the ones that are most commented upon.

For your search terms, and requested sentiments it will find and rank the comments .

Best to keep the search terms simple and to topics that are likely to receive comments in blogs or twitter. It will return hits for web searching, GE (the company), "barack obama"; but not for "dalton mcguinty" (premier of Ontario), next to nothing on stephen harper (Canadian prime minister), and only two for "european union". For now, RankSpeed seems to be focused on sentiment in the United States.

The idea is intriguing. RankSpeed interprets what is said about a site / topic and converts this into sentiments of useful, powerful, good - and a few others. The searcher can select from the list to look for combinations of sentiments, or enter a word. Good, easy, fast, powerful, secure, useful are words on the RankSpeed list, but you might want to look for bad - to find instances where problems were reported or the service is slow.

Below is a search on web searching for the combined sentiments of good and powerful. Yes Google is first, though not by the lead we would expect. The list is interesting because of the new Feedmil.com engine that turns up. This shows that RankSpeed can be useful in surfacing new sites and recent news. I should add, though, that there were some very old and tired items too - like Hotbot.

RankSpeed will show what it has based the ranking on and provide a profile of the comments. See this by clicking on the chevrons beside the site name.

The About RankSpeed page has a 2 minute video that helps to explain purpose and workings.

I'm not convinced it has the database yet to be really useful for finding best sites or gaging the sentiment, but it represents a trend in search and might be a starting point for discovery.

See A search engine for sentiment – RankSpeed, AltSearchEngines (Sept 10)

Internet Resources' Twittersphere

Internet Resources Newsletter for August 2009, in addition to a having a bumper crop of excellent sites (some of which I picked up in this blog), has a section on Blogorama and Twittersphere . Here you'll find a variety of uses and users of Twitter - newspapers, schools, publishers, government.

Travel on Twitter

Tweet deals (and good advice) , Mercedeh Sanati, Globe and Mail (Aug 12)

"As hotels, airlines and travel gurus sign on to Twitter, the social-networking site is becoming a source for up-to-the-minute deals and info. Here's who you should follow".

Has Twitter tips for travellers.

Twitter Update

Twitter's new home page: Information, not status updates by Caroline McCarthy, Webware (July 29)

Changes to Twitter's home page indicate change in perspective - "Twitter's mantra has changed from "What are you doing?" to "Share and discover what's happening right now, anywhere in the world." Chances are, new visitors to Twitter.com are checking it out because they've heard about it in the news--or even integrated into news coverage, as the likes of CNN and MSNBC have started doing. The new language reflects that."

That's for the general home page. Once you sign in it's still - what are you doing?

Using Real Time Search for Current Awareness

Itpints - A New Real-Time Search Engine , Richard Byrne, Free Technology for Teachers (Jul 18)

Educators will find this a fascinating blog. Richard Byrne, a high school teacher in Maine, writes about free technology that teachers can use and ideas for using it.

This posting is on using real time search to stay current on trends and resources for his blog. Itpints is new - it uses Backtype and Twitter. The Advanced Search allos selection for news, blogs, social bookmarks, lifestreaming (?), video and images.

Other he uses are OneRiot, Scoopler, and CrowdEye.

Lowdown onf Real Time Search

What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (July 9)

Danny Sullivan has written the definitive article on real time search - at least until new tools turn up in a week or so.

He provides some definitions:

+ Real time search -- "“real time search” means looking through material that literally is published in real time. In other words, material where there’s practically no delay between composition and publishing. You take a picture and seconds later, it’s posted to the world to see. You think of something, immediately tap it out on Twitter, and your tweet is shared almost as soon as you thought of it"

+ Microblog - "Microblog, by the way, is my generic word of choice for the moment to represent what we do on Twitter when we post, or when we do a “status update” on Facebook, or a post on FriendFeed."

Also several search tools - Collecta, Topsy and others. These are better than using Google or Bing - though he shows us how to do that too. lastly - some third party microblog search engines.

Value? Sullivan quotes Google's Marissa Mayer - "We think the real-time search is incredibly important and the real-time data that’s coming online can be super-useful in terms of us finding out something like, you know, is this conference today any good? Is it warmer in San Francisco than it is in Silicon Valley? You can actually look at tweets and see those sorts of patterns, so there’s a lot of useful information about real time and your actions that we think ultimately will reinvent search."

Reinvent search? More likely to make man even more short term in thinking and acting.

Real Time Search Tools

On Growing Demand for Real Time Search Engines, by Sivarajan, SEO Services Group (Jul 1)

Real time search gets more popular by the minute. Twitter is only part of the torrent. There are also blog postings and a flood of photos from cell phones.

Why care? "Real-time searches are more valuable because it lets you know what’s happening right now on any given topic. Companies use it to handle customer services. News junkies use it to follow political events."

What to use? Probably not Google - or not yet. But there are others that collect and analyze: Collecta, Crowdeye, Topsy, Scoopler.

Also mentioned - OneRiot , a bookmarking site for saving tweets. This can be useful for finding the latest on "climate change' as one example. However, don't count on the "trending topics" to be much more than noise from the US.

Postscript: Some indication that Google is indexing feeds from Twitter. Google has a realtime feed of Twitter, by Johann Burkard (July 4)

Twitter Tools

50 Useful Twitter Tools for Writers and Researchers, Online College Degree Blog (Apr 27)

Fifty tools for finding information through Twitter! I'm not sure how useful these are but they are fun to try.

TwitterPacks , a PBWorks wiki, is promising - organizes Twitter accounts by variety of categories representing topics or location.

Internet Resources Newsletter for June has more twitter resources listed under BLOGORAMA AND TWITTERSPHERE

CrowdEye and Collecta

Two new real-time search engines go beyond standard search to get the pulse of what is happening now.

CrowdEye indexes Twitter Tweets and pulls out matching messages for a query, showing links, a tagcloud of popular words, and hash tags (when available). Can search up to 3 days, and see a volume chart.

Collecta draws on Twitter, blogs, articles, Flickr and other sources.

Altsearchengine ]

See Collecta And CrowdEye Join The “Real Time” Search Club, by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Jun 18)

Crowdeye searches Twitter

Microsoft veteran launches Twitter search engine, by Ina Fried, Webware (June 17)

"Ken Moss, who led the search engineering team at Microsoft for five years, has spent the last months building CrowdEye, a real-time search engine that aims to allow users to better mine Twitter to get a pulse on hot topics.

The service, which is going into public beta on Thursday, offers up not only the latest tweets on a topic, but also a list of the most popular links on a topic and a tag cloud of associated terms. "

IE8 Add-on for Real Time Search

Microsoft Launching Real-Time-Focused IE8 Bundled with OneRiot Search by Jolie O'Dell, Read Write Web (May 28)

Microsoft has a real-time search add-on for the IE8 browse from OneRiot

"For users who have already installed IE8, Microsoft also offers three real-time add-on packages, which add the same OneRiot components contained in the fully optimized browser. Add-ons include OneRiot's real-time search results, top videos, and top shared items of the day."

Twitter search and related

Twitter Search Has Big Ambitions , by Avi Rappoport, Newsbreaks (May 18)

There is so much about Twitter and real-time search that I've added a new category.

"On May 1, Twitter added a search box to the right-side navigation area of its site. The system now indexes all posts (aka Tweets) in near-real time and shows results with the most recent first, just as they are posted-raw and unfiltered. "

Note the conclusion: "All the web search engines-Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live Search, and Ask-have gigantic indexes and years of click-through data and algorithm tweaking. Twitter is unlikely to be the best place to look for any kind of authoritative answers. Wikipedia is better for a simple introduction, and web search is better for shopping and research. But Twitter search is faster than news and blog searches; it's nearly instantaneous and that can be perfect-sometimes."

Scoopler for real time search

Scoopler: real-time search for social content, Pandia (May 11)

"Scoopler indexes live updates from services like Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more. When you search for a topic on Scoopler, the search results in the middle column give you the most relevant results for your query, updated in real-time."

Real Time Search

Google Hurdles Headlong Into Real-Time Search , by Andrew Goodman, Traffick.com (May 14)

The new option in Google Search to see results from last 24 hours strikes Andrew Goodman as a move to the "real time" right now mentality. That, plus the new "rich snippets" that can show content graphically could foster new search behaviour, says Goodman.

"These developments open up a new type of search behavior - further solidifying the notion that many different users will see more and more different results pages with content differently ordered. Although not unfolding exactly as described long ago in these pages, the principle of users taking charge of the "algorithm" (or at least becoming more comfortable with displaying search results in a form that is more useful to them) is gradually taking hold."

Will Google and Twitter Mate?

Why a Google & Twitter marriage makes sense, Pandia (May 10)

There's a new Twitter search engine that searches the content of the microblog tweets and also the content of the articles people link to and recommend. Seems that more and more people are using Twitter as "an intelligence tool for following the latest trends and the hottest news.

Google uses many methods to identify best sources and index them frequently to stay current. For the Web it exploits links, but News doesn't have the network of links (tho blogs do).

But - "Twitter may provide that input, as the tweets give real time information about what the twitterati think is the most interesting stuff on the web this very minute."

And Pandia suggests that Twitter could use Google to fight spam.

But will it happen?