The real-time Web, information indexed almost as fast as it is placed online, is definitely the wave of the Web's future. One of the forerunners of this phenomenon has been Twitter, where every minute hundreds of thousands of Tweets are produced on any subject you can imagine, producing a massive wave of data. This data is invaluable for catching public opinion, breaking news, and more, and there are many Twitter search utilities you can use to take advantage of that - including the newest arrival to the Twitter search party, Bing and Google.
According to the official Bing search blog, their Twitter search offering is still very much in beta - you can check it out here. Trending topics are right there below the search field. A couple of features:
- You can "pause" the Twitter stream.
- If you search for a topic, the most passed around links will be presented along with relevant Tweets (this is similar to Topsy).
- You can see all Tweets by clicking the "see more tweets about" link, where you can then choose between latest tweets or best match.
Yep, pretty basic, but then again, if you're just looking for what's shakin' on Twitter, this provides all you need.
Google's Twitter search is a bit different; the official Google blog says that Tweets will be included in search results (no word really on "when" this will be happening, I'm not seeing it in any of my searches). Now, if you've been on Twitter for more than five minutes, you know that most Tweets don't offer too much value. However, the way that Google will include this data is in aggregate; for example, say you're looking for movie times for the latest Bruce Willis flick at your local theater. Google will bring up that information, as well as tweets from people already at the theater, people who have seen the movie, and maybe even the movie's production company and principal players (there are a lot of celebrities on Twitter, after all!).
Neither one of these search engines are indexing Twitter postings as fast as you can see them on Twitter (yet), mostly because the results are coming in via filters and the information is just. So. Fast. However, this is definitely another indication that real-time Web results are becoming more of a norm, rather than the exception.
More about Twitter, Google, Bing, and the Real Time Web