Lately, I’ve been reading and testing out some of the most discussed real time search engines and for all those of you who wish to stay up-to-date with the latest hot topics, shared links or just what’s being said about your company or other subjects, I think these can be helpful.

So what are real time search engines?

Well basically, imagine a search engine such as Google or Bing that only provides results that come from social media networks. These networks are filled with content that is constantly being updated, thus providing search results that vary as new posts appear. Unlike conventional search engines that provide relevancy-based results that are pretty much always the same, you get information on what is being said about your searched keyword in real time.

Currently, in the race for the “Best real time search engine” title, most of the engines available concentrate on Twitter posts and the difference between each one lies in the organization and filtering the overwhelming data that is being shared on this network.

Here is a couple of the ones I’ve given a look at:

Topsy concentrates on displaying the most shared links about a given subject. It indicates how many tweets the link has gotten and by clicking on the number of tweets displayed, you will be able to dig deeper and view the list of related tweets.

Collecta is simple and updates automatically as new posts appear, without having to launch your search over. Click on a result to read the whole thing and quick links enable you to share the post easily. However, the constant monitoring for your searched keyword can sometimes slow your browser down a bit.

CrowdEye is more complex with a screen filled with a lot of information. After launching a search, you not only get the latest tweets about your query, but also a whole bunch of other information related to your search, such as: a breakdown on the tweet volume per hour, the most popular links and related queries. This might be the most complete – or most complex for some users- real time search engine for the twitterverse today.

Wowd provides results that update live, as topics become more popular on the entire Web rather than in Twitter posts. It does not rely on crawlers or page rankings, but rather depends on users installing a browser app on their PC. As users browse the Web with the app installed, the visited pages are added to the public pages that appear in the Wowd results. As more and more people visit the same pages, they become more popular and get a better ranking in the Wowd results.

Of course, as the buzz around real time search engines grow, there are more and more engines available. Twitter offers their version that pretty much does the trick if you don’t need any other fancy feature than just getting the tweets as they get posted. Yahoo might also be teaming up with OneRiot in order to offer their version of real time searching. One thing’s for sure, real time search engines are getting a lot of attention. Even Google and Bing have announced the implementation of Twitter search in their engines.

Will it become the new way of doing online search? Will crawler-based search engines lose popularity to this new type of hype-based searching? Is popular information better than relevancy-based information?

What’s your opinion?