Collecta – New Entrant In Real Time Search, Will It Be The Future Of Search?
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The quest to deliver real time searches has bewildered many search competitors to shore up their resources. Collecta happens to be an early mover towards that phenomena and is said to be the first effective real time search engine.
How real is real-time search?
There is a spate of terms coined for search engines like Understanding Engine, Decision engine, semantic engine and real time search engine. Real time bug has completely bitten the web giants like Microsoft, Google and even Facebook. Real time search implies serving results for search queries as and when the information becomes available on the world wide web.
Real time search engine are although coined as fast searches but takes a heavy toll on server resources and also increase time taken to initiate and complete the query. This is useful for publishers and researchers but may not mean so much for general users as Google’s indexing priority through page rank importance already serves them well. Google in a way to satisfy real time thirst is rumored to come out with a micro-blogging search service.
Collecta=Twitter+Web in real time:
Collecta serves results in real time,that means one can actually see the activity happening around the search query across the web without refreshing the page.
It also has an impressive interface that allows multiple search queries to be initiated and watched on a single page without refreshing. The interface also allows pre-viewing of search results in adjacent hover window.
It collects results from blog posts, articles and comments on famous blogging platforms and sites. It also serves results from status updates on Micro-blogging services like Twitter, Jaiku, Identica along with flickr results.
The results are served with a time expired counter and the search query also has resume-pause feature. The site makes good use of ajax as user can start and close several queries without a single refresh of the web page.
Its uses and its bad points?
This search engine could help companies to keep a real time eye on their brand reputation. This could also be a great tool for publishers to capture events as and when that happens. The preview feature shows full preview of tweets and comments although articles brings only a small piece of text .
The worst thing about this real time search is that it does not serve older relevant results to the search query so past search results cannot be found, a big dampener for people who want all results (including past results) in real time.
The defect also lies in serving spam comments on blog as results and also the appearance of some html code without any pruning.
Other Alternatives – Future course for real time search?
Oneriot and Scoopler are also in the fray for real time search engine pie. Oneriot lags far behind in being a real time search engine and Scoopler is worth giving a try. Real time search is stickier than traditional search but may not give more page views. The real time search also calls for some real time ad serving and ad matching techniques.
Real time search is also going to become a vital part in online search as even Larry page, founder of Google emphasized its importance and their efforts in achieving the same. Real time search despite being a resource hogger could well be defined as the next phase in improving the search results.
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It’s incredible how fast the search market is moving. I count at least 5 new engines release in the last few months – http://domusinc.blogspot.com/2009/06/facebook-twitter-collecta-crowdeye.html.