How to Search the Web Real-Time
This is a guest post by Ann Smarty, a social media and search blogger and online entrepreneur.
Real-time search is the latest achievement of web 2.0. Never before was it so easy to speak to the whole world and to be instantly heard. This post overviews the 4 most popular search engines capable of generating fresh results.
It is hard to compare them to choose the best one: there are no winners in this game. They all have some benefits and should be used in particular cases:
| Real-time search engine | Data source | How old are the results? | Most important benefit |
| Twitter discussions | Instant | The huge service popularity and thus a large index of data | |
| Facebook discussions | Instant | The huge service popularity and thus a large index of data | |
| Google web index | One hour old | Plenty of search opportunities | |
| Friendfeed | Most social networks + all user-added feeds | Instant | Multiple data sources combined |