Twitter essentially offers real-time micro blogging where users can instantaneously update their followers. Facebook now also offers similar functionality with real-time status updates and news timelines for people to keep track of activity amongst their facebook social group.

With real-time becoming increasingly popular, then why are will still accepting search results for websites that have been indexed within the past year? If you create a new web site, post or comment it is not instantly accessible on the major search engines – despite many having the capability to index sites practically on demand. Will we ever get real time indexing and real-time searches?

I always use the Advanced Search Options on Google to select search results from the past day, week or month. This way I can see more recent and relevant results.

Google admit that they are “falling behind Twitter” and are potentially losing out to micro blogging sites that provide real time information. Google’s co-founder, Larry Page, has said that Google has been losing out to Twitter in the race to meet web user’s demand for real-time information (Guardian, 19th May 2009).

Twitter allows users to broadvast thei thoughts, actions and news instantaneously, while Google can take hours, days or even weeks to update content. “People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it,” Page said in a closing address at Google’s Zeitgeist conference in May 2009 . “I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis.” (Webpronews.com)

What is available to satisfy user demand for real-time search?

Google does offer “nearly real-time search”. But, it is still dependent on the search engine’s  indexing routine. “Nearly real-time” search uses the QDR or Query Date Range trick.  Altering the QDR in a search query will create a different result set based on a time period. Look out for “&tbs=qdr:” in the search query.

e.g. http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:n30,sbd:1&q=news&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK|countryGB

Canging the “&tbs=qdr:” prefix will change the time period of the result set. Adding n30 will show results from the last 30 minutes. Change that number to change the period of results. s30 will return results from the last 30 seconds! So we can have near real-time searches from Google. See more on the QDR trick here: http://blog.omgili.com/?p=108

Soople (http://www.soople.com/) makes it easy for you to do custom searches on Google.

There are also a number of new search engines that attempt to tackle searching from a different angle. Some of these are looking at real-time search. or at least to answer the question “what is happening on the Internet right now”? The new search engines and real time information gateways tend to concentrate on Social content – blogs, tweets, photos and videos – which tends to be the frequently updated source of web content.

Collecta (http://collecta.com/) monitors the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media.

IceRocket (http://www.icerocket.com) is pioneering commercial search by putting the interests and wants of consumers before advertisers. IceRocket has innovative blog search technology to search blogosphere (IceRocket, About, September 2009).

OneRiot (http://www.oneriot.com/) is a realtime search engine … “OneRiot 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.” (OneRiot, About, September 2009)

Scoopler (http://www.scoopler.com/) is a real-time search engine. We aggregate and organize content being shared on the internet as it happens, like eye-witness reports of breaking news, photos and videos from big events, and links to the hottest memes of the day. We do this by constantly indexing live updates from services including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more. When you search for a topic on Scoopler, we give you the most relevant results, updated in real-time. (Scoopler, About, September 2009)

SocialMention (http://socialmention.com/) is a social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc. (SocialMention, About, September 2009).