We've looked at quite a few real-time search engines here at About Web Search; OneRiot, Trendalicious, and six more. Today we're going to take a look at one of the newest players in the real-time search game called 48ers.

The concept behind 48ers (which, by the way, is an homage to the pioneers of the California gold rush...clever!) is to find content and conversations that are being produced right now, over a variety of social networks including including Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, etc. Search for a topic, say, "apple", and your results will look something like this:

You can filter your results by provider on the left-hand side; you'll also want to check out the Trending Topics and Useful Searches. Nothing particularly groundbreaking here, but definitely another tool to add to the real-time search arsenal.

More ways to search the social Web

• Search the Social Web with Social Mention
• Ten Social Web Community Sites You Might Not Know About
• The Top Ten Best Social Bookmarking Sites

Need a source for vetted, academically approved resources you can use in a research paper or project? You'll want to check out SweetSearch, a search engine specifically aimed toward students with a carefully filtered database of 35,000 sources. These are the "cream of the crop" sites, the ones you'll be able to cite in a paper or use for reference without worrying if they're here today, gone tomorrow...in other words, these sites are reliable with a capital R. SweetSearch also offers filtered sources for the following subsets of searchers:

• SweetSearch4Me: Librarian-approved sites for elementary aged kids.
• SweetSearch SweetSites: Specifically aimed towards educators so they can spend less time searching and more time teaching (yay!).
• SweetSearch Biographies: Over 1000 historical and noteworthy biographies with carefully collated information.

More resources for finding the best research sources on the Web

• How To Evaluate a Web Source
• Citing Internet Sources
• 47 Alternatives to Wikipedia
• The Most Useful Web Tools for Students

Need a little help finding something really good to watch? You'll want to check out Jinni,a media search engine that refines its search results by your personal taste, recommendations, and selected genres.

You can use Jinni to find movies to buy, rent offline, watch online, or link to your Netflix account and play with your DVD queue. Here's how Jinni works:

• Figure out what you are in the mood for. You can search by plot, mood, title, favorite actors, genre, time/period, place, audience, and awards.
• Sort your results. My search for actress Julia Roberts came back with the following image:

  

  The default filter is largest images equal most relevant results; you can also filter this by Date, Length, or Rating in the drop-down menu right above the images.

• Where do you want to watch your results? This is where Jinni gets super-cool. You can tell Jinni you'd like to see the default "All" results, or, you can section them off by Movies, TV, Shorts, or Free Online. For example, here's what I found for the keyword "love" in Free Online:

  

  Give Jinni a try and tell us what you think; I'm loving the fact that I can search many different sites online at once for movies or videos that I probably wouldn't have found otherwise, due to Jinni's unique search structure.

  More movie search resources

  • The Best Sites for Free Movie Downloads
  • The Top Ten Sites for Free Full Length Movies
  • The Best Sites to Watch Free Movies
  • The Top Seven Sites to Watch Movie Trailers
  • The Internet Movie Database

I'm a huge fan of Craigslist, but searching for something on more than just one geographic location is a bit tricky. That's where SearchTempest comes in.

SearchTempest lets you search as much or as little of Craigslist as you possibly can handle, for any category, whether it be jobs, real estate, stuff for sale, etc. Here's how a basic search on SearchTempest works:

• Key your location into the "Where" search field. Using the drop-down menu right beneath the search field, decide how far or near you'd like your search to range. You have the option of just a few miles to anywhere Craigslist roams within Canada, the United States, or Mexico (not sure why Europe, Africa, and other countries outside the range of North America weren't included).
• Type what you're looking for, say, a new iPhone or a leather couch or a new car, into the "What" field. You can get as advanced or as vague as you want to be here (note: usually, starting out a little vague rather than exceedingly detailed will bring back better search results).
• Click "Search" and you'll see your results, which will start at the Craigslist closest to you and fan out from there. SearchTempest gives you quite a few options for manipulating your search results: you can map something, get directions, delete a location you don't want, sort by date, best price, best match, state, distance, size; you can even get an RSS feed for results you'd like to keep track of.

In a word, SearchTempest is fantastic. I've only spent about 45 minutes on the site so far and I can tell you right now that it's definitely going to save me a lot of time and effort. Job seekers, especially, should take advantage of how SearchTempest can expand a job search - I plan on adding to my list of useful job search engines.

More about Craigslist

• Five Things You Can Do With Craigslist
• Seven Ways To Use Craigslist More Efficiently
• Streamline Craigslist with RSS feeds