For the past couple of months I've been using the "real time" search engine OneRiot.  Real time search sounds cool, but what the heck is it? And more importantly, what can I get from OneRiot that I can't already get from Google? 

What is real time search?
Let's say you're interested in "constitutional law".  Searching Google for constitutional law returns links to reference material from law schools and Wikipedia that explain what constitutional law is.  The same search with OneRiot by contrast returns links to current news articles and social media with references to constitutional law.  The OneRiot result set quickly provides a list of constitutional law issues getting attention in the media and the people talking about these issues.  Real time search gives me a sense of current constitutional law issues and who is talking about them.  This can be pretty handy for tracking hot news stories, internet marketing campaigns, brand management, or anything else that might be getting attention on the web.

Here's another example using OneRiot to monitor the recent Google outage .  OneRiot provides up to the minute updates from all over the web and let me quickly know the nature and extent the Google's problems.  Based on these results and a couple of quick tests of my own I was able to quickly determine that this would only be a nuisance to our customers.  Real time search was pretty handy.  {gallery}galleries/realtime{/gallery}