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Comment by seasoup | Hacker News Reader

Real time search is not for researching a particular topic, that is what regular search is for. Real time search is used to find out what is happening in the world right now. For example, one day Pandora stopped playing music. I checked my connection and it was fine, then I went on twitter and searched for the word Pandora and BAM! 10 results saying Twitter is down and one results which said "Twitter was down, back up now." So I reload Pandora, and sure enough, it was working.

A second time, my wife was stuck in a traffic jam about 1pm. We thought it might be an accident, but weren't sure, so I searched twitter for the words "accident" along with her location, and BAM! Not only did I get tweets describing the accident, but also a link to an obscure, buried news report on it.

THAT is the beauty of real time search.

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In case you missed it, the difference is that real-time search injects "BAM!" between your query and the generated results.

If I could upvote you twice, I would.

No, but my real time search engine that I created to compete with Bing! does. :)

Also, for real-time search, some users report small to medium size explosions after each query.

searched for the word Pandora and BAM! 10 results saying Twitter is down

You probably meant "10 results saying Pandora is down," but in fact you have characterized my Twitter experience exactly.

The pain that it solves is also solved by (i) turning on the radio (traffic), (ii)Google maps, (iii) visiting Pandora's blog. Additionally, Google is getting much faster with implementing real-time search results.

My conclusion is that Twitter solves a problem (which isn't as deep as a relevant search problem). Also, because twitter solves the problem, there's no room for the OneRiot's of the world.

(i) turning on the radio (traffic) maybe, if traffic is on right then and if they are covering this accident. Even then you only get one perspective, and that possibly filtered through several layers unless its from the guy in the chopper.

ii)Google maps - tells you if there is traffic and is wrong 50% of the time. The 50% of the time I pay attention to it.

(iii) visiting Pandora's blog - I highly doubt they managed to blog about this momentary outage. It was back up in under 5 minutes.

Google is getting much faster with implementing real-time search results, but those results have to be added to the web in order to search them. And who adds these things to the web? Twitter users.

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