Tag Archives: Collecta

The real time search engine Collecta has released some new features this week, adding video and image search results from a handful of partners. Video feeds from 12seconds, uStream and Qik will now be included in search results on Collecta, enhancing the multimedia affect for real time quieries.

Launched last month, Collecta is one of the more recent additions to the real time search engine space. Coming with the concept of expanding real time search to as much of the web as possible, Collecta looks to give a more comprehensive look at what is occurring at any given moment across the Internet.

Not surprisingly, the bulk of this real time search data is coming from microblogging platforms and more traditional blogs, as these have become the most efficient ways of spreading breaking news. 12seconds, for instance, has a short-form blogging model that’s akin to Twitter. In creating such microblogging platforms, companies like Twitter and 12secnds have become standard for mining real time search results.

In the month that Collecta has been out, the company has also shared some of its own tracked data. Collecta is reporting that users are keeping the Collecta window open for 30-60 minutes. What does this stat say about the real time search trend? One could infer that users are facsinated with watching real time search, or like to be able to check on a moving real time search engine. So who does that benefit?

Advertisers is one possibility, should Collecta find a way to incorporate ads, either on the page or as part of the real time search query. This is something that many search engines and microblogging platforms are looking to do, especially as brands turn to such platforms in order to achieve some outreach data mining of their own. This would segue into another monetization option for Collecta, which would be as an enterprise tool.
But will the trend of real time last long, and is it beneficial as a lasting trend beyond enterprise use? How long will users keep a real time search engine window open for an hour or so? I guess we’ll find out soon enough how long real time search will be around, and how we’ll all benefit from streaming search result content. Right now it’s a curious study in human behavior, responding to a need for instant gratification on a cross-device manner, quenching an important aspect of quenching our thirst for immediate answers.

Sourced from PR 2.0

I’m blogging from the Real-Time Stream event in Redwood City, California organized by TechCrunch. I will share more of my thoughts and observations in a series of posts at a later time – there’s just so much too process in “real time.” Let’s just say that the future of search, streams and the concept of the “Now Web” is blindingly bright.

One of the presenting companies here is Collecta, a new take on Web search, social aggregation, and real-time aggregation..

Collecta recently launched a new platform in public beta that fundamentally changes the way people find and access information on the web.It is especially interesting for any brand manager attempting to harness and organize conversations across the social Web.

What we’re learning through Twitter Search, is that people want access to the immediacy of conversations tied to keywords, regardless of the authority, Page Rank, and SEO.

This is the dawn of real-time search…

It’s the difference between finding the right content on the Web and finding the right content, right now across the Web and Social Media.

As Collecta CEO, Gerry Campbell puts it, “I want to know what are people saying about my topic, right now. The minute you put rankings and filters on search, it stops representing real-time.”

Last year I introduced the Conversation Prism with Jesse Thomas to map the social landscape as a way of discovering REAL insight into the conversations transpiring across social networks, where and when they occurred.

Initially, I expected brand managers and marketers to use the search boxes within relevant networks to search for past and current conversations. The dream was, of course, to have a search window into the social web and the social graph, in real-time. Collecta, among other specialized tools such as One Riot, Topsy, and PeopleBrowsr are peeling back the layers of society, focusing the our attention to enhance and amplify listening, and plugging us directly into the conversations that shape impressions and perceptions.

While searching the Conversation Prism is real-time is not yet fully realized, it is imminent.

Essentially, Collecta enables Internet search to finally keep pace with the real-time information streams on blogs, microblogs such as Twitter and FriendFeed, traditional news sites, Web sites, and social networks such as Flickr, YouTube, and Digg. It then centralizes the search results in easy to read, continually updating streams.

While not every search requires the immediacy of real-time, Collecta’s technology can dramatically transform the end user experience in countless applications, such as watching a live stream of comments on a sporting event or television show, following breaking news or a natural disaster, or keeping a close eye on brand or product comments.

I asked Gerry about the inspiration behind Collecta and his response paints a picture representing a true shift in technology and behavior, “The evolution of media needs to catch up to the pace of how people are consuming data now. We need to rethink search from the user perspective, not trying stuff results into existing paradigms and products. We have to start from scratch.”

He continued, “Every minute, stories are told on the Web. Yet in traditional search, most are usually ranked out of the results and therefore, people don’t get a chance to see them. With Collecta, you can see these stories break and unfold.”

Unlike other aggregator or search tools that are simply a mashup of information built on top Twitter Search, Collecta has built an entire ecosystem and infrastructure based on the open messaging standard XMPP. Over the past decade, the Collecta team has placed an early stake in the future of XMPP. And the recent launch of Google Wave ups the ante on XMPP’s position in the real time web.

Collecta is a river, while traditional search architectures are oceans.

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Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, or Facebook

Read more from Brian Solis:

Blog: PR 2.0
Book: Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
Social Map: The Conversation Prism

Yesterday a new – and amazingly cool – search engine launched. I don’t know if it’s a competitor to Google so much as a complement to Google.

Collecta is a real-time search engine. It lets you search through what is happening right now in blog posts and articles, comments, Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca, and Flickr. The difference between it and Google is Collecta is pulling everything in as it happens. Google tends to run a day or so late.

You can run multiple Collecta searches at a time. My searches (one for Really Goode Job and one for iPhone 3.0) each took about 30 seconds to initally show results. You can modify your search parameters with where to search (ie, search in comments, but not blog posts).

It’s still a pretty basic site, but it offers a lot of promise and a different way to approach search. With real-time Twitter search already here, and real-time Facebook search on it’s way, what is happening Right Now is obviously the direction search is taking. Collecta might already be out in front of the game.

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