Mobile Computing News

Photo: Stock.Xchng

The real-time web and real-time search is the next major wave in the online space. But as is customary for the web, it’s assumed you know what it is and, therefore, little has been done to explain what it.

How things were before

As the name suggests, real-time is what is happening right now, in sync with real time. The technical term basically denotes getting immediate feedback for what has just occurred.

The reason it is such a big deal on the Internet is because of how different it is from the way things were done before. The major search engines do what’s called trawling the web for information, which is the act of periodically indexing everything online and arranging that information so that it is searchable. This does not happen immediately, meaning content could be available on the web that you can neither search for nor know about unless you go there directly.

Real-time and the little big players

The real-time web differs in that information is both accessible and searchable the moment it is published online.

Photo: Twitter

Twitter and Twitter searches are the most widely known example of this – as new information related to your search becomes available, your search is updated with that information.

OneRiot is another ambitious upstart in the real-time web arena, with what they hope will become the most popular real-time search engine in the world. The service collects its information from various real-time publishing platforms, including Twitter, so as to give time-sensitive search results. The heavily democratized company claims to pull in over 97% of traffic through its APIs and has had moderate success in monetising their service.

PubSubHubbub, notable not only for its awesome name, is an RSS service with a twist. While RSS aggregators have previously pulled published information from blogs in a way similar to Google trawling the Internet, PubSubHubbub lets websites immediately notify it that information has been published, so it can aggregate the content in real-time.

Real-time and the not-so-little big players

Photo: Google

While these smaller companies aim to change the way we search, Google, Bing and Yahoo, the established big players, are looking at how to incorporate the real-time web into their core offerings while also solving relevancy issues.

What the three companies do acknowledge, though, is that this is too big a space to ignore and while they may be too institutionalised to tackle this new market segment the way smart startups are, they do have the purse strings to buy their way into the industry.