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Many of the recent real-time search engines are based on Twitter. They use the URLs enclosed in tweets to discover and rank new and popular pages. In this post, we'll take a look at the quantitative structure of the underlying foundation, to determine the feasibility and limits of this approach. We'll also look at how to overcome these limitations by using the implicit Web.

There are, of course, already numerous Twitter search engines at this point and every new one will have to offer users a very good reason to switch from their current favorite. Tweetmi is jumping into the fray with a Twitter search engine that focuses on presenting users with a more personalized view. While the service also works well as a regular real-time Twitter search engine, users who sign in to Tweetmi will also see the most active users in their Twitter stream and the top stories from the people they already follow.

Real-time search engine OneRiot and Nambu, a social messaging desktop application for Apple operating systems, today announced a partnership that enables Nambu users to see real-time web search results while searching from within the app.

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."

One of the most interesting trends on the Internet right now is a move towards a more real-time experience. We have seen a lot of discussion lately about how Twitter is leading the charge by creating a search engine for the real-time web, for example. However, there are also a good number of other services that already expose some of the promises of the real-time web. In this post, we will have a look at some of the most interesting ones.

Surchur, a web, blog, image, video, and social media search engine, has just relaunched their online dashboard. The company calls this an "update," but it's more like an overhaul of their earlier product. Launched back in spring of 2008, Surchur's original homepage was barely even worthy of a mention, much less of use. But today, the company's "dashboard to the now" delivers a well-designed and comprehensive view into the "real-time web" - that is, what's happening on the internet right now.

Zcapes is a new "augmented reality" application that lets you instantly transform any object or event into a mini blog using your mobile phone. But this is no ordinary blogging platform. Instead of focusing on publishing, Zcapes focuses on integrating streams from the "Live Web" into whatever blog you create. The end result is a Zcape page that taps into the real-time conversations surrounding an event, activity, thing, or group.

A-ha moments often come when the conventional method lets you down and you need to try something new. That happened on Saturday when Gmail was unavailable to me for over an hour. The outage was long enough for me to have to set up a Yahoo Mail account to send an urgent email. I also used Basecamp to communicate with my ReadWriteWeb colleagues; through that, I learned that Gmail was fine for them. So I started my research online to see what was happening. Of course I started my search with Google, which was not of much use. Then I tried Twitter.