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Lots of buzz around real time search these days, and lots of venture dollars to boot.  During the past presidential election, I had what was perhaps my best exposure to the possibilities of real time search with election.twitter.com (down now obviously).  The premise of the service was to stream (in real-time) any and all tweets that had anything to do with the election.  I have to admit I found it rather mesmerizing, losing time consuming the information.

Fast forward to today and there are a host of services that have popped up surrounding the same premise.  Here are a few examples:

Collecta – Perhaps the better designed site of the two, Collecta’s interface is very clean, intuitive and easy to use.  Simply punch in some search terms (a la Google) and the site feeds you search results in real time.  Unfortunately (though not surprisingly) the nature of the real time web is dominated by Tweets.  Collecta does show other media (blog posts, Flickr content, etc…) but because of the influx of Tweets, the service rarely shows any other content.  A feature that might be nice to develop is the ability to see blog posts and Flickr photos that have been posted in the very recent future.  This somewhat defeats the spirit of the ‘real time web’ – but it would be useful to me as a user.  The company just raised their first round of funding in March to the tune of $1.85 Million. Techcrunch covered them yesterday too, check it out.  Here’s a screen shot (with a Flickr entry):

Scoopler – Scoopler is very similar to Collecta in a lot of ways – their interfaces provide basically the same functionality, though I was surprised to learn that the information they provided was somewhat different.  After a little research, it basically became clear that Collecta was updating their search results much faster than Scoopler.  A tweet that I entered with #redsox hash tag took Collecta around a minute (or less to find and post to my search), while I’m still waiting for Scoopler to pick it up.  Aside from that though, Scoopler provides a really nice functionality by letting you sort the content it provides by images, links or all content…something that I found super useful.  The company came out of Y Combinator and is based in San Francisco and London.  Scoopler is worth a look, interesting and entertaining to use!  Check it out: