There’s a new trend that starting to sweep the web: Real-time. Everyone wants access to information as it happens instantaneously. FriendFeed recently went real-time and now Facebook is starting to embrace it. But those are just two services — what if you could search all the web in real-time? That’s the idea behind Scoopler.
Scoopler is a search engine created by AJ Asver and Dilan Jayawardane that gives you live updating real-time results across a variety of services. These include Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and others. You enter a query and the middle field on the page returns auto-updating results based on information coming in. The two columns that surround it give you hot search topics and popular content from around the web. It’s a pretty nice view of what is happening on the web at any given moment.
The problem here is that a lot of popular real-time results are completely dominated by Twitter. Take tonight, for example. A bunch of people went to go see the new Star Trek movie, which just opened. So a search for “star trek,” yields a ton of results, but every single one of them is from Twitter. It’s nice to have the results auto-refresh when new updates come in, but really this isn’t much better than actual Twitter Search.
Less popular search terms produce better results. For example, I just searched “bananas” and a bunch of newly uploaded Flickr photos are mixed in with the tweets. Unfortunately, when it comes to real-time updates, Twitter is going to trump everything else most of the time, because it is a real-time, active communication platform whereas these other services are comparatively passive, lazy rivers of information.
One element that’s really nice, is the “Peek” feature, which allows you to take a look at pages being linked to in an overlay on top of the results, so you don’t have to visit the actual page. There is also an easy way to share a result right from Scoopler.
There are a few competitors in this space right now as well. One of them, OneRiot, also promises real-time web search. But that service is scouring the web for various pages as they pop up in real time, not updates from all of these social services. In that regard, Scoopler is more like Twitter search or really more like FriendFeed search (though that doesn’t update in real-time — yet). Another service, BlastCasta, mixes Google and Twitter results — which is actually pretty useful (though not live updating).
There’s nothing wrong with having a real-time search engine that yields mostly Twitter results, but Scoopler needs to tailor its product to diversify better. Because given some of the things we now know Twitter Search is working on, that seems like it will be more enticing in the long run. Or it needs to hope that another quick publishing platform comes along to challenge Twitter for results domination.
Scoopler is a Y Combinator-backed company.
Ck out the fact that they got 15k of funding
They are much too late. Yauba is the one to follow in this real time search space. http://www.yauba.com
Not only real time, but full privacy protection as well. Yauba just rocks.
I profiled Yauba when it first launched in India. http://smartbab...ndias-most.html where I called it India’s most important new startup.
However, this was not really for the real time search features but for their privacy protections, which is sorely needed in this world.
I think the danger in all these real time search startups is spam control. Right now there doesn’t seem to be any.
Walter Schoott wrote “I think the danger in all these real time search startups is spam control. Right now there doesn’t seem to be any.”
It’s REAL TIME – how can there be spam control?
@Apple Fanboy
Your attempts at tarnishing this announcement with a plug for your own inferior product is as transparent as Saran Wrap buddy….
Actually I’ll have to agree with Apple Fanboy on this one. Yauba’s alpha is better than most company’s betas or full releases.
Now if they can only do something about the logo that reminds me of dyson vacuum cleaners.
That’s from Y Combinator. It’s $5k per founder, plus an extra $5k.
Another cool search tool is the FireFox addon WebMynd. It adds Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, results to amazon. http://www.webmynd.com
Wow! that’s a good search complier, very sleek and responsive. 10 out of 10.
Thanks for the writeup MG. We have a bunch of new data sources in the pipeline which we’ll be adding soon, including blog comments and more live video.
go AJ
I agree with the fact that the real-time search is the next wave in the search space. And clearly, this happened because of the rise of Twitter. Many companies are attempting to create a real-time search engine based on twitter. Out of them, my favorite is http://www.boilingpage.com that shows the hottest pages on the web based on their popularity in Twitter. The quality of their search results are far better than any of the other players in this space. Worth a shot.
I can remember when one of the coolest things about Google was that the results showed things that were only a few days old when compared to Alta Vista or Lycos that took a few weeks to catch up.
We are definitely living in the future now.
I have to agree that real time is the future.
I also second the comment about Yauba. The babe who runs it is totally hot, and was a former Miss England finalist: http://www.janeenabasra.com
In addition to Yauba, there is ItPinTs.com. A bit cleaner interface, but does not seem to do videos or images like Yauba or Scoopler
Actually itpints do search images and videos
With so many people crawling the web and sharing valuable stuff in real-time, there is less need to wait for traditional search engine robot to do that. We are working on adding plenty more sources to Scoopler to make the content even richer and more relevant.
Real time search is now a commodity. Everybody and their grandmother is doing it. The next wave is predictive search, using microCAT wave scans of your brain to search information for you even before you do.
LOL
oh yeah
http://www.scoo...#britney+spears
friendfeed does this today.
I think Google has a very good reason to start worrying, as more and more of these services begin to pop up they will start losing more and more market share. Especially since it seems like 90% of the younger generation has ADD.
Great UI and deep search across multiple content providers in realtime — cool.
Hi! if u are looking for a real-time web search you should take a look at itpints (http://www.itpints.com).
It shows much more results, have advanced search and allows u to grab an RSS link of your search
Good work guys – love the site!
scoopler search is down. too bad I’ll never remember to go back and try it again.
Was it? Must’ve been a glitch, sorry about that Steve, definitely up now.
thanks Dilan! my memory is getting bad these days, but not that bad. I’ll check it out again now.
where have you guys been? samepoint has been doing this for some time, and across way more sources (including the small blogs, etc.)
Just looked at samepoint… never heard of it. Horrible UI.
Agree they need a redesign big time.
Yeah, just checked it out also… samepoint sucks….
I don’t think so, at least works better than this one
i like the site but still do not see this as a major money-making idea.
There are 2 ways to make the data we call the internet better.
1. Time based filters
2. geographic based filters
All of this information is lumped into peoples search indexes and there have been people trying to organize it in this fashion but it really needs to be on the data end of things. It will have to be a standard everyone uses for it to become real useful, geo-tagging and time-tagging all data. It helps if the data comes from experts in there field in this form, I really don’t care what Joe Blow(social media, twitter, myspace/facebook, blogs) knows about something unless they are very knowledgeable on the subject.
I hate searching for current data and always get severed data from 2007 and older. I hate searching for local data and get websites/results that are across the country.
PREDICTION: What’s next is “social forecasting.”
I want all search results on one page: both realtime and traditional. I like the idea of several columns of results. One could be basic Google results, one could be realtime including twitter, blog posts, etc, plus news, and one could be image and video results.
As several people seem to have mentioned already, I think you are looking for is http://www.yauba.com
Yauba has some serious UI problems. The non-columnar format doesn’t lend itself to fast scanning the way scoopler does.
Nor does it give REAL real-time on demand results the way scoopler does.
Where’s Robin Wauters when you need him? A discussion about anything real time, without a comment from Robin about “real time has no business value”, just isn’t a discussion.
One crucial element that’s missing from all those realtime ’search’ services is ranking…
Right now it’s just a filter on the query on all those tweets… but there’s no way to determine relevant tweets/links.
Hi Melvin,
We rank all the content in the Popular column by how much it has been shared. We also rank all the users from our data sources and are working on incorporating that into the search results.
Go scoopler!
Real-time search (and there’s a slew of them) is dizzying. Watching results scroll down like a ticker tape hardly gives you anytime to digest or comprehend anything.
It doesn’t solve the need to better organize and filter that content. Actually, it accentuates it even further.
The Popular column on the right shows the hottest content for you search and doesn’t change as fast. We’re currently also implementing a ranking system for the live stream to make it easier to identify the hottest results.