Real-Time Search Startups That Deliver What Google, Twitter, Facebook Cant

by Clint Boulton

As the name implies, TweetMeme funnels all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. The search tool categorizes these links into categories and subcategories, “to filter out the noise to find what you’re interested in.” Users leverage the TweetMeme button, which includes its own URL shortener and the story or pages title. Each link that is posted on Twitter adds one link to the link count on that story. Once the story reaches a critical mass of votes, it makes it into the top 10 on the front page and gets tweeted by Twitter.

OneRiot crawls links people share on Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services. Then it indexes the content on those pages in seconds. The result? Fresh Web search results on OneRiot. OneRiot claims that while other real-time search shows you a stream of chatter happening around that subject, it’s not necessarily the news stories, blog posts or Web pages that started the chatter. If you were to search for that same popular subject using OneRiot, you’d find the actual content people are talking about, the site claims.

Another Twitter searching engine, CrowdEye scans tweets, retweets, twitter links and more to help users “slice, dice, summarize and categorize the data to answer your questions.”

The more inclusive Topsy claims it “listens to the conversations taking place all the time on the living, social web,” including Twitter, blogs, Flickr, Digg, Yelp, Identica and many other communities. People use these communities to share reviews, opinions, messages, comments and discussions about things, which Topsy indexes. Topsy indexes what people are talking about.

Monitter is, yes, a live monitor for Twitter, helping you check for keywords and watch what people are saying. To start, download the widget and type three words into the three search boxes where it says “monitter” now.

Another Twitter search tool. This one requires no download and finds tweeters on a topic and related photos, and offers keywords based on your search results.

The just-launched Collecta sifts through recent blog posts, news stories, tweets and comments for fresh info.

Scoopler indexes live updates from Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and other sites. The site’s home page has a very Google-like, easy-to-use search box where you type in your query.

With a different twist from its peers, Omgili focuses on user-generated content from 100,000 platforms, such as forums, discussion groups, mailing lists, answer boards and others.