There’s a ton of news this morning about Bing now incorporating tweets in search results. And you can see why they would want to, using Kanye West’s rumored demise as an example. Celebrity deaths – or rumors of celebrity deaths – always generate a surge in search volumes. Users want to know what’s going on right now and turn to their favorite search engine to find out. As we’ve stated before, traditional search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing struggle in these scenarios. They find it hard to surface the buzzing results that are relevant right now. That’s a hole – and it’s a big one – that is being filled by realtime search engines. But it’s also instructive to look at the differences between realtime search approaches. The two screen shots below show search results pages for the query “RIP Kanye” on Twitter and OneRiot.
Twitter Search
OneRiot Realtime Search
Twitter search – which we love – shows you the flood of conversation from across the globe about the rapper. Most conversational snippets are funny and harmless, some are from “hashtag hoggers” (i.e. users jumping on the hashtag to appear in certain search results, but tweeting about another topic). Some tweeters claim Kayne is definitely dead, some realize it’s a hoax. And because the results appear as they are tweeted it’s hard to keep up with the absolute firehose of new comments (more than 460 new results emerged just in the time it took us to create the screen shot!)
OneRiot search – which we also love, obviously – shows you the buzz on the web right now about the same topic. You find the news, blogs and videos that are most relevant right now - trusted information from sites like MTV.com and NME.com. As we’ve explained before, these results are definitely influenced by the buzz on Twitter. We’ve developed a sophisticated realtime search infrastructure that uncovers the content fueling the conversations happening on the social web. Then, using PulseRank, our realtime ranking algorithm, we process the “signals” coming from Twitter (and other services) to rank and deliver that content among our search results - which all happens in under a second! The end result is that OneRiot helps you filter through the firehose of the realtime web to find the most relevant content right now – the very pages that people need to see to determine if that notoriously cocky rapper really kicked the bucket.
