My first exhilirating experience with real-time search came today using Collecta.com to search “Skype down”.
Sure there are sites like downforeveryoneorjustme.com that will throw up a message like:
“It’s not just you! http://skype.com looks down from here.”
But what fun is that?
Much more fun to commiserate with all the fellow “Skype-Down” sufferers – PLUS you have the possibility of getting additional information.
Collecta.com is a great real-time search engine for this, but there are plenty of others. Here’s what I found out that was MUCH more helpful than the simple (yet still useful) downforeveryoneorjustme.com:
Now I see that one guy is saying Skype is down in Brazil a couple times. It looks like it’s working sometimes in parts of Europe.
And the nice thing is rather than trying to keep connecting to Skype I could just keep this running in a separate minimized window – or better yet, some players in the real time search arena such as Google (a late-comer) will be offering real-time search interfacing on the desktop.
You can read about Google’s plans here.
Nambu (still in private beta) also announced early in 2009 that they would provide a desk-top application.
Being a late-comer to real-time search myself I’m sure there is all kinds of useful functionality already built in that I’m completely aware of.
Short List of Real Time Search Engines:
Of course there are also the old “Twitter Real-Time Search” engines which seem quaint by current standards.
- Wowd.com