For a long while I’ve been strongly advocating real-time search. My take is that if anyone wants to build a competitive search engine that supporting real-time search at its core is the key to success. There’s no reason to just do what others are doing–well, you could, but you’d still have to do lots more, such as real-time search.
You can see the importance of the real-time web grow as Twitter adoption grows. The numbers give rise to a form of real-time search that others can’t quite provide. Santosh Jayaram of Twitter hinted at what Twitter can do here yesterday on a panel discussion. He’s interested in adding in authority, ranking, indexing linked content, and the like, not just keyword trending, though that’s important too.
It’s not just Twitter that’s racing full speed to the real-time seach finish line. You can see it also in Facebook with their new timeline-style design. And FriendFeed with its real-time emphasis.
Each of these companies has an opportunity to offer their own real-time search, so we’ll have to see what wins out. My guess is that the one with the richest data wins. That could be wealth in terms of user numbers, the type of content, meta data, or more. I’m giving myself an out in terms of predicting which service will ultimately win in this category, because I can’t predict the future very well. However, it’s fun contemplating a future with real-time search.