Real-Time Search’s Homes

So where on the Internet can you find real-time search? Twitter, the pioneer of status updates, is the main source. This is due mostly to its popularity and public nature. In contrast to Facebook, which has the feel of a private social network, Twitter is meant to be a place where anyone can read what you write, or “tweet.” Twitter.com/search was the original place to perform real-time search and is still a great tool; however, data usage issues have caused Twitter to hide tweets that are more than 10 days old, so if you are looking for a historical record of status updates—for example, to study the way people have reacted to a certain product or person for the past two years—you won’t have an easy time doing it on Twitter. For that kind of research, you would turn to one of the several real-time search engines that feed off of Twitter’s data pipes, such as Topsy.com.