The Real moment Search Dilemma: Consciousness Versus Memory
June 26, 2009 ·Filed Under Technology News
One of the hottest areas of search right now is real moment search, which attempts to find results based on what is happening right now. Twitter’s search engine fast becoming one of the key ways to navigate the service and discover what folks are thinking about any subject at any given moment. Facebook is examining out ways to let you search your personal stream. Google is waking up to the challenge as well (Larry Page is particularly concerned with keeping up).
Every week, it seems, a new startup launches tackling real day search from a different angle. (Collecta, One Riot, Scoopler, Topsy, Almost.at, Tweetmeme, CrowdEye, Omgili, to name a few). They are trying to apply real date search to all the different streams of knowledge flowing by the World Wide Web right now: Twitter, Facebook feeds, Digg submissions, blog comments, RSS feeds, Flickr photos, YouTube uploads, shared urls on bit.ly and elsewhere. The list keeps getting longer every day.
There is something about human nature which makes us want to prioritize knowledge by how recent it is, and that is the fundamental appeal of real moment search. The difference amidst real day search and regular search didn’t really crystallize for me until I had a conversation with Edo Segal, who sold his real duration search company Relegence to AOL a few years ago and holds three patents on the subject. “Real moment taps into consciousness,” says Segal, “search taps into memory. That is why it so potent. You experience the world in real day.”
This raises an interesting dilemma. whether real date details streams are akin to the living consciousness of the Web, how do you search them? How do you search consciousness? It is not the same as searching memory, which is what Google does when it looks at its indexed archive of the Web and how those pieces of data build up authority by duration. The real date search dilemma centers precisely around how to rank results, and how to resolve the tension within recency and relevancy.
The default, or at least the starting point, for most real duration search engines is simply to put
Yet not being able to filter that stream generates too much noise. Other approaches attempt to add in other factors. OneRiot, for instance, is developing what it calls PulseRank, which takes into explanation the freshness of the info, the link authority of the Webpage where it is coming from, the authority of the person who is sharing the link, and the velocity with which the knowledge is being passed around the Web. that seems like a fair approach, but it may not catch something crucial as fast as simply watching the unadulterated stream.
There are other approaches as well. You can look at what citizens on the Web are actually doing in real day or look for variations in the stream of mentions for any given keyword to notice spikes of activity. When everyone is talking about Michael Jackson or Iran above and beyond the normal level of chatter for those topics, that is when you want to know that you need to pay attention. So possibly real moment search is more like an watchful system.
Can you search consciousness, or can you only watch it pass by? We’ll be debating that at one of the panels on real instance search at our Real duration Stream CrunchUp in July. But it is clear that in order to build sense of the stream, it needs to be ranked by order of importance as well as by duration.
(Photo credit: Flickr/Andrew Sea)
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