OneRiot, the real-time search engine, has just announced a new $7 million Series C funding round led by Appian Ventures, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and Spark Capital. The company blog has just posted more information.
While the real-time search space is particularly hot at the moment, OneRiot has been focusing on opening up and expanding its APIs to allow others to tap into its data. Partners include Yahoo and Microsoft, who of course, will also soon be much closer in the search space. Meanwhile, search titan Google is said to be very interested in the real-time space and is exploring its own way of doing things. And then of course there is Twitter which currently offers search based on its Summize acquisition, but is also said to have something bigger in the works. → Read More
Realtime search for the most part is still mostly about searching Twitter. So it is probably a good idea for fledgling realtime search engines to make it easy to share specific Tweets found in the search results back on Twitter. Since most of the results are Tweets, and search is just another form of navigation and discovery when it comes to the realtime stream, you want to be able to retweet directly from your search results.
OneRiot already does this, and today Collecta is adding a similar sharing feature. Although, Collecta also lets you share any result on Facebook, Mixx, Reddit, Delicious, and Stumbleupon as well (but, oddly, not on Digg). Collecta launched last June. → Read More
There’s no shortage of people who use their Twitter accounts for both personal and business use. That includes plenty of bloggers who send out links to all their articles along with their more mundane updates throughout the day. Some people love this, others hate it, as they just want the links. And while some sites, like TechCrunch, have an account basically just dedicated to those links now, it can still be a hassle to find and follow all of those for every site you want to read. That’s where RiotFeeds comes in.
The service basically hand curates tweets from the top sites in various categories on the web. The end result are feeds that just contain tweets with links from sites of the same ilk. For example, the PulseonTech account features tweets with links to stories from TechCrunch, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb, Wired and others. The PulseonNews feed features the NYTimes, CNN, Fox News, and others. But those are obvious categories — there are also plenty of not-so-obvious ones, like my personal favorite, TightPantsPulse, which is all about hipsters. Here’s the description of that feed: “Links you probably won’t be into from sites that don’t even exist yet.” → Read More
For some, it’s useful to go to OneRiot to search for links being tweeted or dugg in real-time. But for a lot of people it’s better if the sites and services they’re already using have the functionality built-in. That’s OneRiot’s intention in opening up its API to the public today.
The site’s API, which has been in use with selected partners for several weeks, will give third-party developers a chance to bake the results right into their sites or apps. One of the big developers that has already been using it is Microsoft, which has a version of its web browser, IE 8, with OneRiot built-in. → Read More
This guest post is written by Mary Hodder, the founder Dabble. Prior to Dabble, Hodder consulted for a number of startups, did research at Technorati and wrote her masters thesis at Berkeley focusing on live web search looking at blog data.
Real time search is nothing new. It is a problem we’ve been working on for at least ten years, and we likely will still be trying to solve it ten years from now. It’s a really hard problem which we used to call “live web search,” which was coined by Allen Searls (Doc’s son) and refers to the web that is alive, with time as an element, in all factors including search.
The name change to “real time search” seems a way to refocus attention toward the issue of time as an important element of filters. We are still presented with the same set of problems we’ve had at least the past ten years. None of the companies that Erick Schonfeld pointed to the other day seem to be doing anything differently from the live web search / discovery companies that came before. The new ones all seem to be fumbling around at the beginning of the problem, and in fact seem to be doing “recent search,” not really real time search. While I’m sure they’ve worked really hard on their systems, they are no closer than the older live web search systems got with the problem. All the new ones give a reverse chron view, with most mixing Twitter with something: blog data, other microblog data, photos, creating some kind of top list of recent trends. Some have context, like a count of activity over a period of time, or how long a trend has gone on or a histogram (Crowdeye) which both Technorati and Sphere experimented with in the early years. Or they show how many links there are to something or the number of tweets. All seem susceptible to spam and other activities degrading to the user experience and none seem to really provide the context and quality filters that one would like to see if this were to really work. All seem to suffer from needing to learn the lessons we already learned in blog search and topic discovery. → Read More
Yoono, an extension built to enhance both the Firefox and IE browser experience that comes in pretty handy when you go on the Internet mainly to interact socially with your peers and friends, has just released version 6.1 of its add-on, and revamped the interface along with adding a couple of useful features.
I’ve been trying it out for a couple of hours now, and I have to say I’d already miss it if it were gone from my Firefox browser (which, admittedly, I use less and less thanks to Google Chrome). Yoono is essentially a browser sidebar that aggregates and centralizes your online profiles, including from IM tools like Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk and AIM but also a wide variety of social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed and more.
The latest version of the extension, next to expanding support for Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace as well as the ability to easily share pages, images, or videos from your browser across all networks at once, boasts another useful new feature: real-time search. → Read More
Today saw the launch of two new real-time search engines, from OneRiot and Tweetmeme. While the two are slightly different in ways that I went into earlier, all that really matters are the results you get. So I put those two to the test along with Twitter Search, Google Search, FriendFeed and the recently launched Scoopler. To see which would give the best results based on a current event.
One bit of news I was interested in was the space shuttle, because it received some damage today while venturing into space. I decided to do a pretty generic search for “Space Shuttle,” since that is likely what most people would enter of all the possible combinations of words. Here are the results: → Read More
Tweetmeme, a service which tracks the most retweeted messages, has been growing fast and getting a lot of buzz as the best way to discover hot items on Twitter. So naturally, they want to get into the search game as well. But simple tweet search, others like Scoopler and Twitter itself have covered, so the decision was apparently made to get into the new buzzworthy Twitter search game: Content search.
Yes, the second company within the last hour has launched a Twitter link search engine. Tweetmeme’s launch follows shortly after OneRiot’s offering which launched this morning. And both follow news last week that Twitter itself is working on the same feature. As an outsider, it would appear that a few of these companies are tripping over themselves to do this real-time content search before Twitter gets into the game — or worse, Google (which is also having its own search event today). But both claim to have been working on this for a while. → Read More
There was a lot of buzz last week upon the announcement that Twitter would soon expand its search offering to crawl links tweeted out on top of the tweets themselves. The ramifications of such a move are potentially large, as it would seem to be a way for Twitter to serve up a tailored, real-time view of what’s hot around the web. Who knows how long it will take Twitter to actually do that, but you don’t have to wait — another company, OneRiot, is launching the same functionality today.
And scanning tweets is just a part of what OneRiot plans to offer. Today, it will also launch with a Digg link search, and soon it hopes to roll out live search results from a wide range of social services, Tobias Peggs, the general manager of OneRiot, tells me. But there are two keys to how this will work. The first is that OneRiot is crawling not just tweets and diggs, but is actually crawling the pages behind the links themselves. And second, this is all done in real-time. Content is indexed within 35 seconds, Peggs said. → Read More
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