Couple of years back, around this same time when Twitter was launched, most of the major search engines have started to think about the idea of 'real-time' results and include a 'freshness' factor to the results returned for some of the queries that are performed on their search engines. Twitter is both more and less than a search engine, but there are lots of third parties doing search-like things around the Twitter data. Especially because Twitter search seems to be returning real time search results.

Real Time Search Engines:

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. With this increase in demand for real time searches many new real time search engines like collecta, crowdeye have been launched over the last few months.

This new generation of emerging search engines are ready to compete with the big boys to tap into the torrent of tweets, blog postings and online photos that can be captured by cell phones. Below are some of the real-time search engines that allow you to take a deep look as what's going right now.

• Collecta - scours the net for the most recent blog posts, news stories, tweets and comments and displays them in a continuous waterfall. It's a torrent of information to keep track of.

• Crowdeye - currently a twitter only search engine, it gives you results from tweets and retweets including graphs, charts and relevant third party links.

• OneRiot - is a bookmarking site for twitter. Users share tweets that contain URLs to web pages and this site keeps track and returns search results based on topics. This is a really great way to discover some new sites related to subjects and you can interact with the twitter shares right from the site by replying to or retweeting good stuff you find.

• Topsy - lots of stats when you search including the a collection of authors by volume for each topic you are trending. Really like this to find people who are very active around a topic or who are your best retweeters.

• Scoopler - aggregates and organizes content shared on the Internet instantaneously, similar to eye-witness reports of breaking news, with photos and videos from the events, and links to the hottest memes of the day. Indexing live updates from Twitter, Flickr, Digg and Delicious, they are able to surface some of the most relevant results, updated in real-time.

Users needs Realtime Searches

As the current trend on the web is towards more and more real-time information, the race is on to collect, organize, and filter the data so that people can actually may sense of it. Real-time search is one of the hottest mini Web trend out there right now, promising new ways to help users tease out current information they want from the digital information glut. The ability to seek out what everyone is discussing or looking for in the moment captures the imagination.

Even Google made its counter-move to real time search, by coming out with a new set of feature called 'Search Options', which gives users the option to filter out certain results and only see content that is only a particular number of days old, ie. 1 day, 1 week, 1 year. This has been clearly reflected from the words of Google's co-founder Larry Page:

"I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. Now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about realtime."

And as you all know when the news broke that Michael Jackson had died Twitter was able to deliver better relevant results. On the other hand, Google thought MJ died at age 65 in 2007 and sometimes later it was able to show only the "We are Sorry Page"!

So I conclude saying that unless Google take actions on this real time search issues(which was at one time a laughable concept), it will be hard for them to with stand their position, so I hope soon Google will overcome this issue. And I can also sense the launches of more real time search engines in the future with this growing demand for it.

Update:

Hmmm not to much of my surprise, now the Microsoft's new release Bing also have joined the race for real time searches. Sources from Bing said as follows:

"There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter. We've been watching this phenomenon with great interest, and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space. Today we're unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres. This includes Tweets from folks from our own search technology and business sphere like Danny Sullivan or Kara Swisher as well as those from spheres of more general consumer appeal like Al Gore or Ryan Seacrest.

Starting later today, when you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you'll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing's search results. For example, if you type "Kara Swisher Twitter" or "Kara Swisher Tweets" or even "@karaswisher" as your search query, you'll see something like the below. (Note this feature will be rolling out gradually over the course of the next few hours so you may not see it right away.)"