Realtime, realtime, realtime — it’s all you seem to hear now with regard to the web. But back in May, it was just emerging as a new trend that looked poised to explode. And one company at the forefront of that was Scoopler, a Y Combinator-backed realtime search engine. Today, being ahead of the curve has paid off, as the service has just raised a seed round of funding from some big name investors.
When we intially wrote about the service (remember, very early on in the realtime search phenomenon), we noted that the presentation of results was impressive, but the results themselves were utterly dominated by Twitter. That really shouldn’t have been all that surprising considering Twitter’s popularity in the space. But the service has since added some new features to make it more robust.
You’ll notice that when you do a search, there is a clean, two-column layout. On the left, popular shared items appear. These can be links shared on Twitter, Digg items, etc. You can also filter this content by videos, links, and images. On the right, you’ll see the live-updating items from around the web. The majority are still coming in from Twitter, but there are plenty of results from places like Delicious and Digg mixed in as well. These two columns have been swapped since when we first covered the service, and the “Your Searches” column has been removed and place in the top bar.
More importantly, Scoopler has added an entirely new top area to break searches up into categories. Scoopler is calling the feature “Realtime Channels,” and co-founder AJ Asver describes it as, “like Digg’s categories but updated in realtime. They show the hottest tweets, links, videos and images in News, Business, Technology, Politics etc. Â The idea is to drive more search queries by suggesting what people should search for.”
Makes sense. And the results are pretty solid. For example, I just clicked on the Entertainment channel and I see the live posts are being populated with talk about things like the new Michael Jackson movie and also the new Avatar trailer. There is also a constantly updating area along the top of the page to show you the hottest topics being talked about in realtime around the web.
But perhaps the best feature of Scoopler remains the “peek” option. This allows you to quickly see the content being linked to through tweets and Digg results in an overlay without having to leave Scoopler. The service also has little picture thumbnails that get inserted into the stream for things like Flickr pictures.
Scoopler’s seed round has attracted investors such as Ron Conway, (Bebo co-founder) Michael Birch, Avalon Ventures, and XG Ventures. Though the amount of the round wasn’t officially disclosed, we hear it’s in the $500,000 to $1 million range.
Speaking of realtime, don’t forget our second Realtime CrunchUp taking place on November 20.
“forefront of that was Scoopler”
Really MG, you guys at TC need to get at least one copywriter. What do those interns do again?
Scoopler and http://www.yauba.com are my favorite real time search engines … both made by Indians as well!
Go India!
Congrats to AJ and Dilan!
It’s dead …. i mean down………
Did investors see this coming??
Thanks for the great write-up MG. See you at the CrunchUp!
Working fine for me!
The first thing I think of when I hear “Scoopler” is “Poopler”
Scoopler sounds like something you would pick up dogs crap with.
If dog’s crap had seed funding, sure.
My congratulations to Scoopler, clearly a pioneer in the real-time search space. I am sure your readers would also appreciate knowing about other interesting real-time search engines such as TipTop. My team and I have been working hard on real-time search for several years. TipTop at
http://FeelTipTop.com, a semantic Twitter-based search engine, is now available in a beta version. Please give it a try. We have a special for Halloween on our site this week which you wouldn’t want to miss.
Real-time search or looking up information from a couple/three/four information source? Common guys lets get real searching a complicated problem. MySql provides database search and four different copies of that from four different domain does not real mean real-time search.
Semantic Twitter search, wow real big. Hardly any room to create semantic phrases with 140 possible characters with space and commas and periods and exclamation marks, etc
these real time web startups are growing in traffic. http://topsy.com/ has scene tremondous growth and our startup http://sency.com/ has gained traction
Congrats kids, it’s come a long way, but you’ve made something pretty cool. Now set me up some fruit fly traps.