As we become inundated with more and more streams of data from Twitter, Facebook, blog, Flickr, and everywhere else, we need better ways to search what is happening right now. Twitter, Facebook, and Google are working on their own real-time search efforts, along with a slew of startups including OneRiot, Scoopler, and CrowdEye (which launched last night). The latest entrant in the real time search wars is Collecta It just launched a few minutes ago, and it scours the Web for real-time information. Results come from Twitter, of course, but also from news feeds, blog posts, comments, and Flickr photos. Status updates on Jaiku and Identica are also captured.
If you do a search for iPhone, for instance, you will get a constantly updating stream of results which flow down the middle column of the page. If you click on any result, you will see a bigger version of the Tweet or the entire comment or feed item on the right. You can filter the stream by stories, updates, comments, or photos by checking boxes on the left under Search options.
Everything Collecta collects and indexes is then pushed out via an XMPP stream, which means that your search results get updated the second that Collecta recieves new information.
When CEO Gerry Campbell gave me a demo yesterday, I asked him why Collecta doesn’t rank results by some sort of authority instead of simply showing a chronological stream. Campbell used to be the president of search at Rueters, and before that the SVP of search at AOL. So he is very familiar with the traditional search mindset of trying to show the most “relevant” results. He suggested that those types of filtering options could be added in the future, but he wanted to start out with a new experience.
What you are getting with Collecta is the pure stream of what is happening right now. If you want to refine that then you can do that by refining your search terms. He wants to encourage users to perform searches and let the results wash over them. The second he starts re-ordering results by some sort of authority ranking, then something that happened an hour ago or last week might turn up at the top of results. (Of course, a simple time decay could solve that problem).
I appreciate that he is trying to encourage new forms of interacting with search results, but at some point I think he really needs to add relevance filters as well.
Collecta was founded in November of 2008, and raised $1.85 million in a series A round which closed in March 2009. True Ventures and Campbell were the investors. The company was co-founded by Jack Moffitt, Brian Zisk, and Patrick Mahoney. Derek Powazek of JPG Magazine fame is the creative director.
Real time???
Real slow for me.
Maybe it is because many people are visiting the site, but the message I get is
Searching the Real-time Web
Collecta is not like other search engines. Instead of finding old stuff, we look for mentions of your search term happening right now. If you’re seeing this message, it’s because we haven’t found a mention of your term yet. So you could:
Start a new search while this one is running (we’ll notify you when something comes in here).
You can always check to see what Google has for your term.
Thanks for using Collecta!
No thanks, I think I’ll go back to twitter search
Thanks for checking out the site. We have had an overwhelming response to the launch and we are doing everything we can to respond to any issues people see. Please check back again I am sure you will love it!
Dandee
Collecta.com
Try searching for “Iran” at http://www.yauba.com … gets real time results in milliseconds, blows away Collecta!
block yauba already
Collecta = FAIL
Note to startups … maybe buy a few more servers on a month by month plan before you announce a launch.
Can anyone help me?
My gmail account got hacked, and by the ‘Activity Log’ feature of Google, I could figure out the IP address from where my email account was logged in.
The IP was 204.15.23.171
I do not know how to figure out which browser is this. Is there any software that can figure out whose machine is this where my account was opened and emails were tampered?
How to track down this hacker with IP 204.15.23.171 ?
cool
WOW!
I welcome them to the jungle of information, hope they will help us search it better the existing search engines.
http://www.youtechno.info
Wow, this site is extremely slow and doesn’t work at all. I searched for ‘Iran’ and ‘Obama’ .. both didn’t show even one result. This sucks. Am sticking with my favorite real-time search engine http://www.boilingpage.com .. It shows the latest popular pages related to Iran and Obama when I searched the same in http://www.boilingpage.com
So slow…
love this competition. The interface is interesting.. though the results are a bit slow to show up as of now.
Interestingly, Collecta knows it might not satisfy everyone, so “You can always check to see what Google has for your term.” is also provided on the page..
For a change, GOOG needs to play the catch up game!!
Here’s what I’m not getting:
1) You raise $1,85 million before launching
2) You just launched, and you already have a team of 10 people
3) One of them is a “community manager”, but you’re not a community
And most importantly:
4) You launch a site that is not working. (I keep inputting queries but don’t see any results, just a spinner animation)
I don’t get any of that.
funny, i thought the same thing. i guess it helps to know people.
scalablity on a launch must be an art.
Real-time, not working at all for me— Real-slow!
It is slow today – must be those Twitter API.
By the way, you can ask a question, and AAfter Search can get real-time answers for you.
mine is still loading…
Collecta seems me much better than Scoopler and OneRiot.
I prefer Yauba as it mixes real time with other results to provide the context
please block these yokels that are constantly spamming that crap-site yauba
Yauba rocks!
I just performed the same search on every service mentioned in this article 10 minutes ago.
Collecta still hasn’t produced any results.
The fastest to bring back results were Scoopler and OneRiot.
Scoopler’s results were the most up-to-date, giving me tweets from one minute ago. OneRiot had tweets from 2 hours ago and CrowdEye from 6 minutes ago.
I like CrowdEye’s user interface for its flexibility, but I think I prefer Scoopler’s for its simplicity.
Scoopler wins this round.
Have now tried multiple search terms like Iran/US Open/Weather but not a single hit in 15 minutes. Maybe they should have tested it some more before going live.
It still amazes me when companies come out of beta and don’t anticipate major traffic when they launch.
Getting Real-time Results…
Search started at 9:37:09 am and I’m still waiting for results.
According to Collecta my real-time search for “iran” started at 9:53:00 AM. 3 minutes later and they have returned 0 results(GoogleNews returned 206K+ in .19 seconds). Apparently their is something going on in Iran, but not involving Twitter or blogs….according to Collecta.
I’m hoping this is because their network is being crushed by all of the TechCrunch publicity. Actually, I don’t care why they wasted my time to return nothing, I won’t use them again.
exact same thing for me. in fact, Iran was the suggested search term when I logged on to the site. Waited about 5 minutes and no results.
I think itpints ( http://itpints.com) still being more usable
It pints is a nice one! Very fast … I am impressed. Itpints rocks as well!
Come on guys, I know first launches can be tricky, but could you not have planned for the traffic influx? Really wanted to give it a spin, alas…….
Scoopler works the best out of all of these — the best part, they did it with $15k of funding versus $1.8m and $15m?
My bets are on Scoopler in the long run.
I like http://icerocket.com for real time search. they are the best with blogs and they have twitter, news etc
I love how the one with the least amount of funding is returning the best results.
Congrats on the launch, look forward to checking this one out after the initial rush.
I think all 3 of them need to improve their UI drastically. It’s either too crowded or too plain.
Twitter for tweets and Google for everything else. I think these newcomers will have to offer a lot more value to truly stand out on their own.
Interesting usage of XMPP for real time search. Is this thing usable with the gtalk client?
Is it me or do you find it interesting that Scoopler has just $15k of funding while OneRiot.com has $15M. Despite this, Scoopler does a better job..
Well I never got an upload for any of my search terms and I gave popular relevant terms. It just kept loading and loading
Well I never got an upload for any of my search terms and I gave popular relevant terms. It just kept loading and loading
no idea why ppl are banking on twitter to do real time search, when twitter itself is working on that technology…..seems like there is no place to put VC money, similar ideas getting funded again and again just to show in their portfolio that they are working on real time search
i searched on the term 5 mins ago, that wheel still rotating no results yet….they should cache things not really go after one site after another to search things in real time
no results after waiting 5+ minutes, but search.twitter.com gives tons of results…FAIL!
It’d be very nice if search engine vendors such as CrowdEye and Collecta would make an auto-discoverable search plug-in available. Combined with advanced search plug-in organizing add-ons such as Web Search Pro this would make it much easier to keep track of the available engines in any given category, especially now that so many new real-time search-related services are launching. You can then easily compare the search results from several engines in the same category.
BTW, Erick, you may want to fix the typos ‘recieved’ and ‘Rueters’ in your post.
Just one more off-topic comment: as far as I can tell the comment feeds for individual TechCrunch posts don’t quite validate. Here’s a link to FeedValidator generating an error report of the comment feed to this particular post: http://sn.im/tc...ctafeed_invalid
Some feed readers choke on this.
I hope this helps.
I think their have a better name than any of the others. Great start. Some searches seemed to hang and produced no results though.
Twicsy is cool. http://twicsy.com/
I find incredible to believe that they launched this without proper testing or proper browser agent identification..
they seem to think iron is safari and it glitches. opera 10 = glitches.
you run a test of IE8 and it identifies it as IE6???, when you use IE7 it just renders incorrectly..
i don’t use the term often but….
Collect= EPIC FAIL
*collect=Collecta
So your only criteria for importance are that it runs in all browsers? Don’t you even care about the functionality? Haha.
Sounds like glitches for sure, but isn’t what it does when it work its important too? Seems ok in Firefox and IE7, and Opera 9, and Chrome.
Lets see what they do once the launch bugs are fixed.
Not at all what i am saying. what i mean is that how can you launch something that don’t works across browsers since it is a search engine and how it can launch with so many bugs and worse, identify browsers incorrectly.
Looks really cool. In browser XMPP client for real time updates – is this where the web is moving to? Does this work with existing XMPP clients like gtalk as well?
Here’s another real time search: http://crowdeye.com
I like http://www.spezify.com because it combines google, yahoo, and youtube.com search results with twitter. This way you don’t have to go to multiple sources.
OMG…still not working? I tried two days ago, and now again today. Come on…
Seems to be working for me right now. Initial search page is very slow to load but once it does it works.
Got good real time hits within about 30 seconds for Obama, and same for Iran. Good for stuff people say lots about, less for other stuff.
Real Time Search is the easy part. Aggregating multiple sources into a consolidated stream of disconnected information, while amusing, is basically useless. When someone makes sense and can derive relationships between this unstructured data, then we’ll have something. For now it’s a circus act at best. Oh, did we mention that, yet again, there is no business model around any of this?
VC’s must be getting desperate…
Isn’t the business model to do something brilliant analytically with that stream of aggregated data and sell that brilliance? News, market analysis, real time trending, brand management. This is a field for visionaries, it’s too easy to just say it sucks without even trying to be creative. All the current real time search apps are gen-zero right now. They are a completely new market, and it won’t be long before business models emerge.
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...a-crowdeye.html.