Real-Time Search: 5 Alternatives to Google

Want breaking news? These five databases/services do their best at providing real-time access to various info sources.

Unlike traditional search engines, real-time search sites index updates from social communities such as Twitter, Delicious, Flickr and YouTube, providing you with a peek into the hot discussion topics on the Web.

Many people have turned to real-time search sites to follow events (think Captain Sully landing on the Hudson River or the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti)-these results can often point you to blogs and other new sources of information that traditional search engines may have overlooked.

1. Collecta - When you enter a search and click "Now!" Collecta gives you a streaming list of real-time posts-everything from comments from readers on news sites to recent tweets and Wordpress blog entries. You also have the option to narrow your search to just blog posts and articles; comments on blog posts; updates from Twitter and microblogging sites Jaiku and Identica; photos from Flickr, TwitPic and yFrog; and videos from YouTube and Ustream.

2. Leapfish lets you search two ways: via real-time search and a more conventional search. The results page will give you top news results, a Wikipedia page (if there is one assigned to the topic), top Web results (you can choose whether Leapfish uses Google, Yahoo or Bing as the search engine), video results, Twitter results, a section for blog results and images, top posts from Digg and a shopping section (where you can view top hits from Amazon or eBay). Leapfish also lets you filter results by Web-only, real time, videos, images, news, blogs and shopping.

3. OneRiot sort search results by "Pulse" and you'll find the most "socially valued" content related to your search, ranked by how many times it's been shared on various social sites.

4. Scoopler aggregates and organizes content in real time by indexing updates from news sources and social sites such as Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more.

5. Thoora identifies what's attracting the most buzz by indexing the blogosphere to determine which mainstream news stories attract the most interest.

Source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9147099/Real_Time_Search_5_Alternatives_to_Google_Bing