Meet Collecta, the latest real-time search engine to enter the market

Collecta is a new search engine that returns results based on real-time content from various sources across the web including blogs, social media sites, news publications and more. It was released today and is one of the latest real-time search engines to enter the market.

Enter a search term and Collecta fetches the most recently generated content surrounding your query from blogs and twitter tweets to other online sources. As described by Collecta, “Collecta is not like other search engines. Instead of finding old stuff, we look for mentions of your search term happening right now.”

Features that compliment this new search engine include:

• Insight into what people are talking about now/the latest topics of interest, titled Hot Now and located under the search bar.
• The ability to conduct multiple searches within one interface – as Collecta puts it, “start a new search while one is running."
• Brief descriptions of individual search results – get these by clicking on a listing.
• The ability to filter search results by content source: stories, comments, updates, photos.

Other real-time search engines in the market
Collecta is not alone in their attempt to bring real-time content to users, other search engines such as CrowdEye, Scoopler, OneRiot, and Topsy are competing in the market. However, not all generate content from the same sources; some, like CrowdEye for example, specifically index content from Twitter and archive information for no more than three days. According to Search Engine Land, Collecta’s CEO, Gerry Campbell distinguishes the engine’s real-time capability as “currently the only real-time search site, pushing content to users from the various sources it draws upon in less than a second after it appears online.

The future of search
While still in beta, Collecta – like others in the market - has kinks to work out and improvements to make. Regardless, I don’t see real-time search disappearing but instead only becoming more and more prominent in the online world. The likelihood that it will evolve and merge with traditional search to become the way of the future is great. This has many reconsidering their involvement in and participation with real-time content – traditional search engines, companies, marketers and researchers alike.

Learn more about Collecta.