However, nearly everything else about the new Android application is the same as its mobile counterpart, including its search verticals of "web," "images," and "buzz" which sit above Taptu's search box on the app's main screen.

The "buzz" section contains real-time results pulled from sites like Twitter and Digg as well as from other social sharing websites, blogs, and data pulled from select panel of internet users who have downloaded the OneRiot toolbar and are anonymously sharing their web-browsing data with the company. This aggregate information is actually the most prominent source of real-time data for OneRiot's search service. As of September of this year, OneRiot claimed to have 3 million active toolbar users out of the 20 million or so who have downloaded the toolbar to date. Meanwhile, they're indexing around 20,000 links from Digg and 5 million from Twitter.

It's this data which powers Taptu's "buzz" section where you can find breaking news and other currently "hot topics" being discussed on the web. And unlike Twitter's trending topics, for instance, OneRiot doesn't link to raw tweets but to the actual news stories and blog posts that are sharing the information.

The main Taptu homepage also links to these trending items by way of a tag cloud whose colorful blue bubbles take you directly to the buzz section when tapped.

If you're interested in trying the new Android application, you can download a free copy from the Android Market on your mobile phone. If you don't own an Android device (or iPhone), you can still use Taptu via its mobile website available at www.taptu.com.

You give Factery a list of links and a keyword and it will build an index of all the facts asserted in those links about your topic of interest, delivered in XML or JSON format. The service can run on top of a search engine but could also be used in any number of other ways. I've been feeling unsatisfied with other search engines all day since seeing a Factery demo Monday morning.

Compare that with the Factery results page - I don't even need to click through if I don't want to, I feel like I got a great overview of the story just from my search page. Perhaps that's a problem - for a publishing industry that already says it's scared of search engines - but as a reader it sure isn't my problem, it's great. Why would I want Google News to tell me where I can go to find information if someone else will just give me the information?

The company's test demo searches Twitter and Yahoo Boss - neither search is as exciting as I'd hoped 100% of the time, but it's often remarkably good. Factery is also testing an interesting integration with Silverlight stream reader Sobees, in which linked pages from Twitter or Facebook are annotated with automatically extracted highlights via Factery.

I expect a whole lot of companies are going to at least try this API out and I'm excited to see the results.

How This is Unlike Other Real-Time Search Services

Factery is talking a lot about its ability to analyze links shared over Twitter, but that's probably just because Twitter is easy for people to understand. The fact is, the service can perform on-demand analysis of text behind any set of links. That's what differentiates it from other real-time search engines like OneRiot, which also analyzes the text of pages linked to on networks like Twitter and offers an API to display real-time search results on other sites. Competitor Collecta analyzes Twitter streams in real time and offers an XMPP API to push new search results live to any page.

Factery is a different kind of animal, though. It's more like a smart search inside any other search. It doesn't even have to be search, though. The company talks a lot about how they make mobile reading more efficient by pulling the salient information up to the surface of a page, instead of requiring mobile readers to load multiple pages.

I thought of five or six different ways I'd like to use it just while talking to the company on the phone. (I'm not going to share those here, either. I think some could offer an important competitive advantage.)

I'd Love to See This Work Everywhere

Yesterday I was testing a new Android app from the Sunlight Foundation that lets you track members of congress. One tab in the app is a search for your congressperson in the news. Unfortunately, the page excerpts give no indication why the politician you searched for appeared in that news story - just that their name did, somewhere. That search is powered by a Yahoo API, probably BOSS, but it's not any fun to use at all. How unsatisfying, I thought, when I could have a list of key facts concerning my search query in the list of links that the search brought back. But that was yesterday, and Factery is just launching today.

The possibilities are truly endless. That's probably why Ron Conway, one of the leading investors in the real-time economy, joined others in investing in the company. With $1.2 million in the bank, Factery is a modest developer play with a whole lot of potential.

Give Factery's API a try and let us know what you think. It's free to use; the company says it may start inserting "sponsored facts" (isn't that an interesting phrase) into results later but things like business model and to a lesser degree de-duplication are still works in progress. I sure do love this idea.

Using the OneRiot API, Taptu's new homepage presents a mobile-friendly search engine interface complete with search box and verticals for searching just the web, images, and now, "buzz." Previously, the site included verticals for music and video searches too, but those have seemingly been done away with in an effort to simplify the interface.

The new "buzz" section is where you can find the real-time results. Here you'll find content pulled from sites like Twitter, Digg, other social sharing sites and the company's own panel of users who have downloaded the OneRiot toolbar and are sharing their web-browsing data in anonymous aggregate.

While Twitter is clearly a source of breaking news, we've always found it a bit odd that OneRiot includes Digg in its "real-time" search engine. We've never thought of Digg as anything near real-time - in fact, it pales in comparison to Twitter when it comes to the speed with which information spreads. With the immediacy possible on today's web, sites like Digg seem much slower - painfully slow at times - often taking hours on end to feature the news that had already been buzzing on Twitter for half a day.

That said, Digg and other social news sharing sites can sometimes unearth news that had been overlooked by major media outlets, especially when focused on a particular niche like technology. For example, just think of how many stories you read on someone's personal blog or Reddit and never saw anywhere else on the web. By tracking niche websites like these as well as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, social bookmarking sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon, microblogs and URL-shortening services, Oneriot can discover links that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Taptu's new mobile search engine interface currently works on major touch-enabled devices including the iPhone, iPod touch, G1, Nokia N97 and 5800, and the BlackBerry Storm 1. The Taptu iPhone application will also be updated soon to include the additional functionality. You can test the new service yourself starting at 9 AM EST by pointing your mobile browser to www.taptu.com.

Twitter has acquired two other companies so far, that we know of. Search engine and sentiment analysis service Summize became Twitter's own search engine and Values of N sold its assets so engineer Rael Dornfest could be brought into the company. Here are ten other startups we think that Twitter should consider acquiring next. Which kind of company would you most like to see become part of Twitter itself? We've got a poll below.

Some of these we think are likely acquisitions, some less so. In making this list we considered both functionality that would be helpful to have added to Twitter's own site and technology that would be worth buying instead of just building in-house. Whenever a platform company builds technology that a number of other startups offer, there is a risk of scaring other people away from investing in development that the platform could just reproduce. Acquisitions of startups on a platform probably increase the appeal of development though, as it's a chance to get in on the game.

Quite Likely, if It Hasn't Happened Already

Bit.ly is the most full-featured and popular URL shortener on the market right now and was recently selected as Twitter's own shortener of choice, dethroning TinyURL. Bit.ly offers all kinds of smart analytics, from real-time click tracking to semantic analysis of topic keywords from the links that people tweet.

One trusted industry source speaking on the condition of anonymity told us that Bit.ly servers "were moved into Twitter's racks months ago in preparation for this change" [of becoming the default shortener]. Bit.ly is becoming too important to Twitter to keep that functionality outside the company's own shop and the two companies share some investors. We will not be surprised at all if a Bit.ly acquisition by Twitter is announced sometime in the near future.

Could Happen...

Tweetmeme is another fast growing Twitter analytics service that tracks sharing on the service. With another chunk of new features just added today, the service is looking a whole lot like "Feedburner for Twitter" but with even more viral distribution possibilities. The Tweetmeme API is quite interesting and could complement Bit.ly quite well.

Twitpic is a popular way to share images on Twitter. The site faces a strong challenge from ImageShack's YFrog, but independent Twitpic would be a cheaper acquisition and is already well known among Twitter users. (Twitter should probably look at Enjoysthin.gs; it's got the best user experience.) An increase in imagery on Twitter would probably offer the company a lot more advertising real-estate.

Tweepz is a fascinating Twitter search engine that acts like a directory that lets you parse your results using various metrics gleaned from Twitter. Check out this search, for example. Twitter could benefit from making this kind of search available to users, advertisers and researchers - and Tweepz has already built it. See also Twazzup, another company doing interesting things with Twitter data.

Longer Shots

An iPhone app company could be a good buy for Twitter; there's certainly plenty of options. M.Twitter.com is a good mobile service already but someone specializing in super high-quality Twitter apps for the iPhone, Android and Pre could be good to bring in house. It could be AteBits, makers of Tweetie. There may not be enough reason for Twitter to buy one of these companies, though.

A desktop Twitter app company could help Twitter increase user engagement. Many of the most serious Twitter users (though not all) swear by desktop access. Twitter could acquire the most popular and arguably most innovative desktop app, Tweetdeck, or it could bring Seesmic in house. Tweetdeck would be cheap and shares investors with Twitter. Desktop apps may be too limited in appeal to be a compelling acquisition target.

Geo-location could be a good feature to add to Twitter. Search by user location could be made much more meaningful and the list of things that could be done with it is very long. Brightkite is popular and well developed, Shizzow is pretty and wouldn't be expensive. On the other hand, browsers themselves will likely all become more location aware in the near future and Twitter may be satisfied with its current location data.

A semantics company could bring structure to the Tweets, making them more useful and easier to advertise against. Right now links Tweeted are semantically analyzed by Reuters' Calais and sent to Bit.ly, but we wouldn't be surprised if Twitter was interested in scooping up a small semantics shop and helping it scale so that analysis was being done in house. Twitter may feel like semantics don't need to get that close to consumer users, though. (Disclosure, Calais is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.)

Topify is a widely loved service that intercepts your new Twitter follower notification emails and sends you much more useful ones. It's great but probably too easy for Twitter to just reproduce itself.

FriendFeed plus Twitter would be a match made in heaven. It would be an engineering powerhouse. It would be a step towards mainstream user adoption of FriendFeed, a service that can't make up its mind which end of the sophistication spectrum it's targeting. It's also quite unlikely to happen. If there's one related startup we can imagine turning down a Twitter acquisition offer, it's probably FriendFeed. (Though the investment-laden and highly ambitious OneRiot is a close second.) Nonetheless, it would be awesome if FriendFeed's cross-network aggregation, threaded conversations, groups, media support, search and more joined forces with Twitter.

Ultimately, it may be most likely that Twitter's next acquisition will be something vapid. A service that aggregates shopping Tweets, or celebrity Tweets, or something else that will fall short of taking advantage of the Twitter platform's huge potential to change the world. Twitter staff makes relatively simple use of its own service, so hoping that it will acquire companies that make it all the more powerfully sophisticated may be an early adopter's pipe dream. [Update: After some discussion this afternoon, I am thinking it's time to reconsider this position I've held for some time. Twitter staff is not full of dummies, I'm sure, and it has probably been inappropriate of me to write as if that's the case.]

Maybe not, though. We wouldn't be shocked to see Twitter pick up at least a few of the companies above. What do you think? Are there other services you'd like to see become part of the Twitter team even more than the above? It's a wild and woolly micro-content ecosystem out there - anything could happen.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Doug Coleman, Jolie O'Dell, Dana Oshiro , Lidija Davis and Steven Walling.

Although results based on freshness alone are available through the search engine's real-time firehose setting, the results returned through the Pulse Rank setting are weighted based on several factors that riff off similar considerations for the static web and Google's PageRank system.

Pulse results will now be a product of the following considerations: Timeliness, domain authority, individual reputation, and acceleration. The new algo attempts to weed out spam links (or links from known spammers) and give preference instead to "more thoughtful sharers whose links tend to get retweeted and dugg."

According to the blog, the algo tweaks will also improve detection of whether a page is trending or whether it's simply a large, popular destination and always has been.

"We're also getting a lot of leverage from our Artificial Intelligence systems that constantly 'learn' how to improve the way we rank results," the post continues.

Collecta purports to pull in blog posts, comments, Twitter and Identi.ca updates and photos concerning your search query, as fast as technically possible. There are some rough edges for sure at launch, but Collecta has a lot of promise. Pagerank or other systems of authority are in many cases not what you're looking for in search - timeliness is.

Three of us at ReadWriteWeb tested Collecta this morning and only one of us got a consistent flow of new results coming in. It was slow and choppy for two of us, on three different internet connections. The ability to filter out certain kinds of results, to run multiple persistent queries at once and to preview items before clicking off site to read them were all great features.

Twitter search results, unfortunately, link out to a user's front profile page, not the particular Tweet that is shown on the results page. We imagine that's a small oversight that will be fixed promptly.

Blog posts are limited to WordPress.com blogs at launch, as the companies have common investors and an agreement. Sometimes filtering for comments on blogs brings up results when filtering for blog posts does not.

Despite warts and bumps, there's really nothing else quite like Collecta available on the market right now. It's a good way to get a handle on the real-time flow of information about a topic and it has an incredibly strong team.

We expect real time search to be an important part of the search world as Twitter search has already changed the way we research things online dramatically. Expanding that out into more media types is something that just has to happen.

We'll be keeping a close eye on Collecta as it expands and improves.

OneRiot's Tobias Peggs said the new capability is "a key feature. They are the first of these type of desktop applications to offer real time web search results in addition to the usual Twitter conversation search. This means Nambu users don't just keep track of conversations, but they also get to find related fresh content (news, blogs, videos, etc) as it emerges on the real-time web."

"OneRiot's real-time web search engine is the best way to find fresh, socially-relevant content from across the web," said Eric Woodward, CEO of Nambu. "Now our users can track realtime conversations on any topic, and discover new related content at the same time. It's a great combination."

In addition to OneRiot real-time web search, Nambu now offers Twitter and FriendFeed search to index conversations and links. The search offering is rounded out with Yahoo! News, which provides feeds from AP, Reuters, and other outlets.

"With the increase of noise and spam in real-time conversation search," said Peggs, "it's good for the users to also have real-time content search. Now you can track a term ... see what people are saying, and also discover emerging content. It's a nicely rounded experience for the user."

Here's an example of what those results would look like; OneRiot results are highlighted:

According to the IE Addons Gallery page, "This special version of Internet Explorer 8 comes loaded with fresh OneRiot goodies, putting the real-time web directly into your browser."

For users who have already installed IE8, Microsoft also offers three real-time add-on packages, which add the same OneRiot components contained in the fully optimized browser. Add-ons include OneRiot's real-time search results, top videos, and top shared items of the day.

Here's a composite screenshot of the webslices, featuring top shared results and top videos:

Users will notice the OneRiot search bar in the top right of the browser; the add-ons also give users the option of selecting OneRiot as the default search engine. OneRiot search results are indexed based on an algorithm that weighs the number of social media shares each link receives as well as the authority of the sharer, among other factors. OneRiot results are intended to be highly recent as well as highly relevant and include the exact number of shares along with the context of the share.

The mind reels at the possible use cases for such an API: Blogs and news sites could track and serve real-time, hot-topic links. Businesses could turn out impressive buzz-monitoring applications. Social action networks could use it to spread the word on civic engagement. Almost any site or organization could imaginatively and profitably employ OneRiot's instant link-indexing algorithm (which we think actually works better than many similar products). It just happens that TwitterBar was the first.

Peggs continued, "The real-time results are much more buzzy than static results, which pushes user adoption much more because the results resonate with what users want. Real-time search results can inform a discussion users are having with their friends."

TwitterBar, the first OneRiot partner, is a Firefox add-on that allows users to send Twitter updates directly from the Firefox address bar. Although the TwitterBar functionality is currently "very alpha" (to coin a kind, new term for early-launching tech) the implications of instantly gleaning and sharing real-time results are fascinating, especially considering that social web sharing boosts a link's OneRiot score.

"If you look at the real-time search players out there," said Peggs, "the key for them is to get distribution. Clearly, a number of users are going to turn up at MyRealTimeSearchEnginge.com, but the way to drive user adoption is to distribute. You need to be very confident that you can scale. What the API does is prove that OneRiot is a company that believes they can scale."

Why is OneRiot so confident in its ability to scale? While Peggs wouldn't comment on back-end server tech specifics, he did say, "We have got a world-class team of search experts. We have more PhDs than you can shake a stick at. They have invented some really smart ways to process an incredible amount of social signals in real time and deliver results back. It's a combination of team and technology that's backed up by internal testing. We know what we can support, and we're excited for other partners to adopt it and start hammering away."

The OneRiot API is for developers of looking to enhance their user experience with realtime web search powered by OneRiot. The OneRiot API is free and available by request.

We look forward to seeing who takes on this opportunity. In the meantime, here are a few screenshots of the OneRiot API in action:

Results are prioritized based on an algorithm of about 26 factors, filtered for spam, and unduplicated if links are shared through multiple URL-shortening services. There are two search modes: Users can browse real-time results or (in "pulse" mode) see links ranked by social relevance. We spoke with a caffeinated and exuberant Tobias Peggs, general manager at OneRiot, about 20 minutes before the new release went live at 9 a.m. "We're trying to get a sense of current social relevance; what are people talking about right now," he said. And more than any competing product currently available, OneRiot succeeds.

"One factor in the algorithm is velocity, the hotness factor: How many times a link has been shared on the social web within the past minute?" said Peggs. "We can get a sense of whether a story is increasing or decreasing in popularity from one minute to the next."

Users' online reputations also influence the score and help provide a means of ranking social relevance, kind of like Google's PageRank system. "The trouble is," said Peggs, "who's to say what's more important: A link shared by Scoble or a link shared by me? It doesn't necessarily mean the links he shares are more important."

A link's relative popularity (how many times has a link been retweeted or dugg) is also normalized so potentially relevant results don't get dwarfed by stories on CNN or major outlets.

New features of the current OneRiot release include searching within specific domains and blogs to determine which articles have the most current social buzz, searching for a specific URL to see how many shares it's received, identifying the first user to share the link, and expanding results to see every single share along with the user and any surrounding text.

So if OneRiot results are intended to be the freshest, most current links available, when do results disappear? "Because the results change in real time, users can come back and keep searching to stay on top of the latest information," said Peggs. In other words, top results will constantly fluctuate, and the maximum time a link will appear without refreshed bouts of sharing is a few days, meaning constant vigilance would be needed for social SEO in real time.

Also, because of the real-time nature of the product, Peggs noted, "Users tend to search more times per day per query than on a traditional search engine. Ultimately that's good for monetization because we have the opportunity to reach those users more times per day." Monetization plans at this point primarily consist of serving display ads.

When breaking down search behavior, Peggs stated that twenty percent of search queries are navigational (users seeking a specific URL) and 40 percent are queries for static information such as recipes or contact information.

"Google does an amazing job on that 60 percent," said Peggs, "but the remaining forty percent of users are looking for what's going on at this particular moment. What are people saying right now? Because of the way Google indexes the web and the amount of time it takes to index and rank pages, they are never, ever going to serve those socially relevant, very fresh search results. OneRiot is not a Google killer; it's not going to find your dentist's phone number. It's a completely different experience.

"What we're doing is showing people the real, true potential of real-time search," he continued. "It's way deeper than seeing a string of conversation around a keyword. We're uncovering the web content - blogs, videos, news stories. It's very different from what traditional search can do. Hopefully, people will start to see the potential of real-time search."

On the search results page, OneRiot emphasizes links, though you can also click on a small link at the bottom of each result to see the tweets that included this link. From there, you can also reply to a tweet. If OneRiot finds new tweets that fit your search, it will automatically prompt you to reload the page.

To get data about current trends on Twitter, OneRiot uses both Twitter's own API, as well as data it gathers from users who have installed OneRiot's own toolbar in their browsers.

Looking for Feedback

As OneRiot's GM Tobias Peggs told us yesterday, the company decided to test its new Twitter search feature on a separate page for now (twitter.oneriot.com), in order to get feedback from customers.

We, for one, would like to see the ability to organize results by how many users have linked to a certain page, for example. It would also be nice if OneRiot gave us the option to search for conversations around a specific link by copying and pasting a URL into OneRiot's search box.

Overall, we like OneRiot's approach to searching Twitter. In some ways, it is similar to MicroPlaza's search functionality, though OneRiot's results focus more on the real-time experience.

One of the companies was Me.dium, a browser add-in that provided real-time access to what others were surfing. Me.dium incorporated its technology into "social search," releasing an alpha of its search engine earlier this year. Today, they're relaunching that social search as OneRiot.

"Like other search engines, we keep a running record of the contents of the Internet. However, unlike other search engines, we prioritize that information based on its current popularity with our community. This makes OneRiot's search results relevant, fresh, friendly, and pulsing with the real-time energy of the web."

When OneRiot finds results that other users are currently visiting, it uses the data to provide an indicator of how important those results are: Emerging, Surging, or Raging.

How does OneRiot get the data? Users can opt to install a browser add-in that allows them to share their browsing data with OneRiot, much in the same way services like Alexa and Compete record usage. OneRiot claims to have more than 2 million users sharing their activity, today.

So What's Hot?

Currently, political and entertainment topics sit atop the list of popular topics - for obvious reasons. But it's not just the search results. The new OneRiot blog tends to focus more on the pop side of Web browsing, as well, featuring stories on Lindsay Lohan, psychics, and Palin's chances for 2012.

Searches for topics like technology - even for topics like iPhone 2.2 and Android - result in the standard search result fare. Nothing geeky is really "pulsing" with the OneRiot crowd. The closest I could find? News on the Mars Rover.

Is This Solving a Problem?

Some would argue that another search engine is the last thing the Web needs. Especially a search engine that delivers more information on the latest pop princess.

When I read about the new direction for OneRiot, I felt exactly the same way I felt when - after a great deal of build-up - Like.com announced that they were going to become a shopping site. I was disappointed because, while the technology might be improving search, it wasn't really improving my search experience.

OneRiot strikes a similar chord. I'm not disappointed in the technology per se. I'm disappointed that the current application doesn't do much to solve my search woes. I'm sure there are a number of people who will find OneRiot valuable, but at this point, it's not delivering much in terms of my interests.

It's Still Early

There seems to be a whole new crop of contenders looking to improve search as we currently know it: Cuil, Delver, and OneRiot among them. And with the ever-growing glut of information at our fingertips, we could use the help.

Two recent innovations hold the promise to help us sift through information more effectively. One is the physical location from which we're searching for information - the geolocation information - and the other is the people we trust to give us information - the social information.

For those pursuing the social aspect, the key to winning users is having peers that they trust using the service. Otherwise, the relevance is just as irrelevant as any other site. It's a classic "chicken or the egg" problem. Relevant social content attracts users, but users are needed to determine relevant social content. And that is OneRiot's challenge: finding enough users - with similar interests - to make the search results more compelling than the standard robot-driven search.

OneRiot still carries an "alpha" next to its name. It's very early in its life, with room to grow and improve. As it grows, OneRiot has the potential to corner niche categories with specific markets and to increase its user base organically from there. But will OneRiot gather the critical mass required to make it a search contender with a wider audience? We're still searching for the answer to that one.