Twitter, OneRiot, Google

Interesting article from NYT on Real time search

"TECHNOLOGY blogs have wondered whether Google is a lumbering giant in this Twitter moment, unable to handle streams of tweets that were broadcast just seconds earlier."

"A number of search start-ups have appeared recently that differentiate their offerings from older search engines’ by playing up their specialized focus on the real-time Web. For example, OneRiot, based in Boulder, Colo., covers Twitter among other social media, but it has an intriguing means of reducing Twitter spam: it does not index the text in tweets — it plucks only the links, reasoning that the videos, news stories and blog posts that are being shared are what others will be most interested in."

"Google’s almost-real-time search provides much higher-quality results than does literal real-time search. When speaking about the need to index the Web “every second,” Mr. Page acknowledged the usefulness of taking a wee bit of time to analyze the gathered information. “If you really want up-to-the-second information, it’s not going to be as good as if you’re willing to wait a couple of minutes,” he said. “I’m not sure everybody needs to be seeing this stuff every second.”