Collecta Blog – Real-time Streaming Search

Yesterday Twitter announced that it is making its stream available to both Bing and Google. And Bing will get Facebook, too.

Collecta is elated that these streams are now in the hands of the big guys.

The reason? Collecta has focused on doing something *different*. You could argue that the window for a startup entry in Twitter search ended when Summize was acquired by Twitter in July of 2008… an event Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell participated as an investor and advisor to Summize.

Since that time it has been clear to Collecta’s founders that real-time search is about not only Twitter, but the *rest* of the web.

You remember the rest of the web, right? The thing with 1.7 billion users and all the world’s published digital content… the thing that’s not constrained by 140 characters and shortened links?

That’s where Collecta is focused.

Twitter’s coming of age signals that the game is changing; the real-time web is here to stay, just as we predicted.

Collecta was founded to address an emerging market – one that is created based on the natural evolution of two trends:

Trend 1 – The web is accelerating. The entire pace of content generation is speeding up. And it’s not just user generated content. Examiner.com has assembled an army of journalists who are publishing high-value stories at a blistering rate. People and Entertainment Weekly blogs are on fire. There are thousands of examples. These are the rule – not the exception.

Trend 2 – Users have an insatiable appetite for information. Users expect timeliness. We’re now completely immersed in broadband, swimming in wireless access, connecting via our netbooks and mobile devices… the Internet’s information is an integrated part of our lives. As just as present as the air we breathe. This appetite for up-to-the-second information will grow for the foreseeable future.

In the confluence of these two trends lies an opportunity: Bring the vibrance and richness of the new “now web” to users. It shouldn’t be limited to a single social network, but reach across all media types and publishers to bring everything together. And it must be built upon technology capable of handling the skyrocketing volume at web scale.

At the heart of this opportunity sits Collecta -the world’s only real-time, streaming, push-based web search.

Throughout the excitement surrounding the Real-time search craze, Collecta has been diligently building revolutionary infrastructure — infrastructure that we expect to become the de-facto standard source for the Web’s timely content.

Yesterday Twitter hit the mainstream and time will show that phase 1 of real-time search has come to a close. The game went up by a few notches. Collecta has been waiting for this – bring on Round 2.

For more on the Google and Bing news, please read:
- ReadWriteWeb
- AdAge
- Washington Post