Real-time search: the future is now

While Europe was on holiday in August, the US real-time search vendor OneRiot.com quietly announced a cash infusion of $7.0 million, about £4.3 million. By any measure, the amount is significant. It pushes the total investment capital pumped into OneRiot.com above $25.0 million, slightly more than £15 million. In today’s choppy financial waters, that is a tidal wave of cash for a company indexing news, videos, blogs, and web sites that people share online. OneRiot.com’s business model has magnetic appeal.

The investment makes one fact clear – real-time search is hot. The shift from archival to real-time search is under way. The push to eliminate ‘wait’ or latency in indexing is going to put pressure on some traditional search vendors. I hear Darwinians at the London School of Economics and INSEAD whispering, “Survival of the fittest”. Do you?

The real thing

The CEO of OneRiot.com is Kimbal Musk, who has been involved in PayPal and the Zip2 online restaurant and city guide business. His track record seems to be giving OneRiot. com an investment turbo boost, alongside value added by the firm’s engineers in the form of PulseRank, which sorts search results by the amount of excitement each produces. The idea is a variation on Google’s PageRank. OneRiot.com looks for links that point to certain topics. Via its mathematical method and inputs from OneRiot.com users who provide feedback to the company, OneRiot. com asserts it delivers relevant results from real-time sources that it indexes.

As a further differentiator, OneRiot. com has cultivated a partner network, making its index available to external programmers via the OneRiot API (application programming interface). The firm has a deal with Microsoft, with the One Riot.com real-time search function embedded in Internet Explorer 8.0. Other companies working with OneRiot. com are social networking services Digsby and Yoono.

Another real-time search vendor with venture backing is Collecta.com (formerly Stanziq Inc). Founded in November 2008 by Jack Moffitt and Brian Zisk, Collecta.com has raised about $2.0 million, about £1.2, a fraction of the OneRiot.com funding. OneRiot.com outperforms Collecta.com in traffic as well, according to data from Compete.com. OneRiot.com hit 300,000 unique visitors last May and June with Collecta.com winning one third that number in the same period.

Collecta.com asserts that its advantage is the speed with which it processes user queries. Results include time stamps and the Collecta.com interface reports on the amount of time a query takes. The system is positioned as true real-time. The system parses the query and generates results that include tweets, news items, web log posts, and videos, refreshing as new results become available to the system.

Collecta.com uses XMPP standard technology (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol – http://xmpp.org.) to which it has added its proprietary software.

Collecta.com uses a three panel interface which can also be found on Scoopler.com. One displays hot topics, the current user’s queries, a search box, and hot links for sharing the search and the Collecta.com web log. The centre panel presents query results which automatically refresh.

The contents of the result are shown when you click on the document. If a tweet contains a short url, you can click on the url and the source document appears in a new browser window. At the bottom of the results page is an ‘older results’ link.

For a fraction of the money invested in OneRiot.com, Collecta has created a reliable, low latency service.

But the real news in real-time search comes from IceRocket.com. Founded in early 2004, it has been including real-time content for some years.

Blake Rhodes, who works from Dallas, Texas, started indexing web logs in 2005 and has since added Twitter messages. The system displays how many followers a tweeter has and includes a link tracking feature so it is easy to see how many people are linking to an article or document.

One of the site’s latest innovations is the Big Buzz search. IceRocket.com searches blogs, tweets, news, videos and images in real-time from one page. You can see an example of the service at http://kennedy.icerocket.com, which instead of a flat page of text, presents a dossier on a particular topic. The service is available by clicking on the Big Buzz tab on the home page at www.icerocket.com. You can create your own Big Buzz dashboard.

Making it easy

Rhodes told me: “What’s different is you can see the real-time pulse on topics on one page. The blogs show you more in depth views, you have the short posts from Twitter and there are news items as well as video and images in real-time. We tried to create an easy way to see the Buzz on the topics user ants follow.”

So, these three online services offer a range of real-time features and functions. OneRiot.com has substantial venture financing. Collecta.com has developed a useful service with ‘real’ real-time updates taking place as you browse the search results. It has launched an innovative product with less than $2.0 million in financing. IceRocket.com has matched some features of both, investing time (2004 to now) and less then $400,000 in venture funding.

The first lesson is that real-time search is buzzing. As well as these three firms, dozens of others are wrestling to gain an advantage – including Google. There are small players like itpints.com, and Twitter’s own search system, acquired when it bought Summize in 2008. In addition, enterprise software vendors are working to create software connectors so their commercial clients can tap into data flowing through real-time pipes like RSS (really simple syndication) and APIs like those of OneRiot.com. real-time search is now a geologically active region in the datasphere.

Second, the amount of money required to enter the market varies widely. OneRiot.com’s investment is more than 60 times that of IceRocket. com’s. Technical expertise and the marketing investment required to attract traffic seem to be key. OneRiot.com pulls more traffic than Collecta.com and IceRocket.com falls in the middle. So Collecta.com and IceRocket.com must both up their marketing game.

Finally, an entrepreneur can tap into the real-time search market in different ways – with unique features and on a modest budget. If successful it is a potential acquisition for a larger company looking for a jump start in real-time content processing and information retrieval.

One obvious point: We can watch this phase change in real-time via the OneRiot.com, Collecta.com, and IceRocket.com. With real-time search services we may be the first generation in history to be able to watch knowledge reshaped in real-time.

Stephen Arnold is an analyst and a speaker at Online Information

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