The Best Realtime Search Engines

It’s no secret that in the past I’ve been disappointed with realtime search, however, recently my feelings have changed as I discovered two great realtime search engines.  The first is OneRiot and the second is Wowd.  While both of them are considered realtime search services, their approaches to solve the same problem are different.  OneRiot looks at four major sources to find trending topics throughout some of the web’s larger sites, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Digg.  Wowd on the other hand uses a software based approach which essentially turns their users computers into mini datacenters and by doing that they can gather trending topics from potentially any public website on the web.

In addition to just search, OneRiot also does some curating of information and includes what they feel are trending topics on their home page.  OneRiot will also allow you to break down trending topics by category (e.g. Tech, News, Gossip, etc) making it easy to keep an eye on things you are interested in without having to see things that don’t appeal to you.  Wowd has a feature that they call Hot Topics which appear within search results.  These hot topics display similar or related topics to your search to make it super simple to dig deeper into a topic without having to worry about what search query to use.

Both of these search engines have a lot to offer, I would recommend you check out each of them.  What do you use for realtime search?