Don’t worry, it’s not Twitter! For our Best LittleCo of 2009, we’ve chosen a small company whose product launched in 2009 and quickly became a leading example of one of the year’s big trends: the real-time web. Our pick for Most Promising is something that could change the way people search on the Web. Last week we announced that Google was our choice for Best BigCo of 2009 , due to its product innovation in 2009. Today we’re announcing Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company , as selected by the ReadWriteWeb writers. Sponsor This is the 6th year we’ve done this and many of the small companies we choose each year go onto much bigger things. Here’s a quick look back at previous winners: In 2008 we chose web office vendor Zoho as Best LittleCo and Brightkite as our Most Promising. Zoho is still competing well above its weight bracket against office software giants like Microsoft and Google. However it’s fair to say that Brightkite hasn’t delivered as much on its promise as we thought it might, due in part to the emergence of Foursquare as ‘the next big thing’ in mobile social networking. In 2007 Twitter was Best LittleCo and in a break from tradition we named “the open source movement” as most promising. Twitter, of course, has since gone on to make a huge impact on the Web and media. In 2006 YouTube was Best LittleCo and Sharpcast Most Promising. YouTube was acquired by Google in October of that year. In 2005 37Signals was Best LittleCo and Memeorandum (now Techmeme) and Digg were joint Most Promising. In 2004 Ludicorp , creators of Flickr, was Best LittleCo and Feedburner Most Promising. Both went on to be acquired, by Yahoo! and Google respectively. Now let’s find out who is ReadWriteWeb’s Best LittleCo of 2009. Then on page 2 we name our Most Promising company for 2010. Best LittleCo of 2009: Aardvark Aardvark (our initial review and then a comparison review ) is a social search engine that combines artificial intelligence, natural-language processing and presence data to create what the company calls “the real-time Web of people.” The company was founded in 2007, but the product only launched in March 2009 at SXSW. It quickly became one of the companies we point to most when we discuss the Real-Time Web , one of the most significant trends of this year. In our report on the Real-Time Web released in November, we described how it works: “You can ask Aardvark any question, and it will try to find a person in your extended social circles who knows about that topic and is available to answer at that moment. Aardvark facilitates these conversations through a very polite IM bot, an iPhone app with push notifications, the company’s website, Twitter or email. Instead of broadcasting your question to every one’s stream of information, Aardvark delivers the question only to people who are relevant and available.” Unlike Yahoo Answers or similar services, Aardvark doesn’t keep a repository of frequently asked questions. The service’s mission is to get you current answers from experts in your own social networks. On most days, over 85% of all questions get answered. As we noted in our report, Aardvark’s got an all-star team of engineers from Google and Yahoo and high-profile investors. It’s already cutting deals with major tech brands and is rumored to be on Google’s acquisition list. Whatever happens to the company, the use cases for Aardvark are just beginning to be explored. In short, Aardvark impressed us a lot this year and it made no fewer than 3 of our 2009 best-of lists : Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009 Top 10 Real-Time Technologies of 2009 Top 10 Startup Products of 2009 Aardvark’s iPhone app was also popular with our writers, two of them putting it in their top 5 mobile web applications of the year . Next page: ReadWriteWeb’s Most Promising Company for 2010… Most Promising: Wolfram|Alpha Wolfram|Alpha launched in May and ended up making our list of the Top 10 Consumer Products of the year . It was also the most hyped, with the possible exception of Google Wave. Inevitably, Wolfram Research’s “computational knowledge engine” disappointed many who were looking for a Google killer . But Alpha introduced a new paradigm for search engines: Instead of giving you a long list of links, Alpha tries to give users an answer based on information from reputable sources. It also enables users to compute and calculate things off that information. While it isn’t useful for everybody yet, the Wolfram Alpha team has worked hard to expand Alpha’s knowledge. If you are an engineer or scientist, Wolfram Alpha might just be the most useful web app for you. For the rest of us, Alpha’s ability to solve anagrams, aggregate weather data and tell you the distance between two cities proves to be useful, too – although not as useful as the service’s ability to solve complex math problems. Wolfram|Alpha also launched a $50 iPhone application in October. Even though Wolfram Alpha’s web interface is available for free, the company insisted that its mobile application offered enough new features to justify this price. We listed some initial use cases for Wolfram|Alpha in July, but it’s a safe bet to say that the best of this product will be seen in 2010 and beyond. If Web 2.0 was about creating data (user generated content, to use the most familiar term for this), then the next generation of the Web is all about using that data. Wolfram|Alpha is premised on using and computing data, so we think it’s a product to watch in 2010. Now let us know your thoughts on our picks for Best LittleCo (Aardvark) and Most Promising (Wolfram|Alpha). Discuss

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Best LittleCo of 2009 & Most Promising for 2010

At the close of a whiz-bang year, OpenID has a lot to be proud of. With a community of 9 million sites that use OpenID logins and 1 billion individual users, OpenID has effectively revolutionized the way we are able to create and maintain portable identities. Best of all, it’s not just bloggers and geeks who sang OpenID’s praises: The U.S. federal government got on board this year, too. Sponsor OpenID accounts are enabled by such providers as AOL, Blogger, Flickr, Google, LiveJournal, MySpace, Verisign, WordPress and Yahoo with announcements of upcoming OpenIDs from Microsoft and PayPal. Sites that allow users to login with OpenID range from major retailers and music labels to news organizations and social sites. As for the government, at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, DC, earlier this year, the General Services Administration and several government agencies announced they would adopt OpenID as part of the White House’s Open Government Initiative. Participating companies included Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo and Wave Systems. On the government side is the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and related agencies. Not only is the government’s involvement a vote of confidence for OpenID’s innovation; it also speaks to the product’s security progress, which was spearheaded by security committee head and PayPal exec Andrew Nash. In addition to developing and spreading the OpenID product, there’s also the OpenID Foundation, which appointed its first executive committee, including Chris Messina and Don Thibeau, in 2009. Portable identity is one of our favorite themes from this year, and we applaud what OpenID has been able to accomplish. What do you look forward to seeing from the product, the foundation and OpenID partner sites in the year to come? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Discuss

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OpenID Ends 2009 With 1 Billion Users

Collaboration services targeted for the small business market often seem more like software suites than web-based services with deep linking capabilities and tag-based environments. For example, the new offering from HyperOffice focuses on features that are fundamental to small business operations but lacks the advanced capabilities that we see from a number of Enterprise 2.0 services. Is this a good thing? Is this due to the domination of document-based systems that have traditionally been such a part of the small business world? Sponsor We are torn on this one. We see a number of companies offering services such as real-time collaboration environments. Still, the portal mindset seems to have such a hold on the small business market. HyperOffice looks like it is providing a service that has value for the small business. But like others we have seen, HyperOffice feels monolithic. It provides the capability to create personal and group environments but extensions to the web are limited. In some respects this may be just the right approach. HyperOffice users may not want the capability to build data mashups and tie into services like Twitter. The company points out that the market is flooded with Web 2.0 style point tools. The HyperOffice platform is a one-stop shop. This may be smart as the company is targeting Microsoft Sharepoint and Lotus Notes users. A SaaS like HyperOffice may be enticing, perhaps even more because it has similar functionality to the offerings from the big players in the market. The HyperOffice UI resembles a Microsoft Office environment. The main page includes icons such as desktop, mail and calendar. The features are basic but provide a clear functionality for the user. HyperOffice has personal and group settings. Groups may share calendar items, collaborate on documents and other tasks. Additional features include tasks, notes, a wiki and the ability to search Google and Yahoo! from within the application. Here’s an overview of the service: Google Apps and Zoho provide a deeper web experience than HyperOffice. But there is definite value here for the company looking for an affordable, CRM service. Pricing starts at $7 per user, per month. Discuss

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Why Do Small Business Services Sometimes Lack Sophistication?

The real-time web was hot this year and it’s likely to become a standard expectation on sites all around the world next year. We’ve tracked this trend extensively with a face-to-face summit of industry leaders and an 84-page research report on The Real-Time Web and Its Future . Who were the big movers and shakers in real time this year? Check out our list of the top 10 below and let us know if there are any important ones we missed. Sponsor ReadWriteWeb’s Best Products of 2009: Pubsubhubbub Pubsubhubbub , created as a 20% project by Googlers Brett Slatkin and Brad Fitzpatrick, is described as “a simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS.” It delivers updated content in real-time from a pinged hub server out to all subscribers that have requested updates. Real-time PubSubHubbub feeds are already being published by FeedBurner, Blogger, LiveJournal, LiveDoor, Google Alerts, Feedoor and the feed republishing service Superfeedr. Facebook’s FriendFeed, LazyFeed and the newest version of Netvibes are consuming Hubbub feeds so far, as are a number of small sites and services that are using the feeds for machine-to-machine communication. Hubbub consuming applications are reporting server traffic savings of up to 85% and engineers love it . RSSCloud RSSCloud is a technology that’s been a part of the RSS 2.0 spec for years but got a new burst of development energy this year when creator Dave Winer began working on it in part as a way to create a decentralized Twitter experience. RSSCloud is similar to Hubbub, is often implemented in conjunction with it but doesn’t deliver full content updates with the notification of changes to a feed. The first major move to adopt RSSCloud was by blog publisher WordPress . The latest addition to the technology is a new feature called CloudPipe , which will enable delivery of real-time feeds to desktop and mobile clients, even behind a firewall. Creator Dave Winer has been a key figure in an incredible number of the most important technologies of the read/write era of the web. He created the first popular blogging software (Radio Userland), was the first to enable podcast delivery in an RSS feed visa-vi the now standard method of enclosures, he built the web’s leading blog ping server (weblogs.com), he ushered RSS into the mainstream, he created the format for sharing bundles of RSS feeds and other outlines (OPML), he wrote the XML-RPC framework (predecessor of SOAP) and the MetaWeblog API for remote blog management. Now Dave Winer is working on real-time web technology and we’d be fools to not watch what he’s doing. Facebook Facebook, for all its shortcomings, has turned more than 200 million new people on to real-time streams of content pushed to their browsers in 2009. If you think this paradigm is important, Facebook deserves a medal. Google Real-Time Search Honorable Mentions Echo – real-time comment aggregation Evri – real-time semantic news tracker Lazyfeed – topical discovery engine Netvibes – now probably the most popular real-time consuming feed reader in the world Just this week the Big G showed of its new real-time search feature . It kills what Bing and Yahoo are doing. It’s simple but elegant and effective. For certain search queries, real time web pages, Twitter updates, Facebook content, MySpace updates and more will appear in a subtle, streaming box in your results page, with a pause button. It’s not live on the public site yet, it’s just a demo, but it’s going to be very, very big next year. Big enough that it belongs on the list this year just for being demoed. Twitter search Whether you’re watching brand mentions for your work or participating in a semi-obscene public ritual of riffs on a trending meme – millions of people now regularly watch the real-time updates on Twitter search results pages. Twitter bought a search engine called Summize in July of 2008, built by a group of former AOL scientists and originally intended to be a sentiment analysis technology. It has become incredibly important this year. When the site’s new GeoLocation API gets put to more substantive use, that search engine is going to become all the more important – in ways that could change our day-to-day lives. Next page: Top 10 Real-Time Technologies of 2009 6-10 Superfeedr Julien Genestoux’s Superfeedr is a service that pulls in content feeds from around the Web and then offers updates for those feeds in XMPP or PubSubHubbub format. It’s like FeedBurner for the real-time web and in fact just added publisher analytics ala FeedBurner today . Superfeedr is a key enabler for other applications and if you want an interesting view into the nitty gritty of the real-time web, you should go subscribe to the Superfeedr company blog right now. Genestoux says the companies using his service so far include SixApart, Adobe, Twitterfeed, StatusNet and a number of small services such as Webwag, EventVue, Quub, AppNotifications, Excla.im and SmackSale. That’s an impressive list and your company could well be on it by next year. Tornado This September, Facebook open-sourced the newly acquired FriendFeed’s real-time infrastructure. It’s a fast, relatively easy way to add real-time flow to your application and developers around the world are excited about it. We’re all about the potential here at ReadWriteWeb and we think Tornado has a lot of it. We hope to see big things from this project next year. Breaking News Online’s iPhone App Breaking News Online is an international news organization founded by now 19 year old Netherlands native Michael van Poppel. Van Poppel somehow sold a video of Ossama Bin Laden to Reuters two years ago and has since built up the fastest, smallest news organization on the planet. The American Red Cross watches BNO closely for notices of new natural disasters. MSNBC paid what have been a hefty sum for control over the Breaking News Online Twitter account this month, but the organization’s iPhone app lives on in the hands of the original organization. It’s a simple app but one that will keep you on top of world events around the clock like nothing else. It’s a great use of the iPhone’s new Push feature, implemented this year. Aardvark Aardvark is a social search engine that combines artificial intelligence, natural-language processing and presence data to create what the company calls “the real-time Web of people.” It’s got some heavy engineering behind it and this author uses it almost every day. Google is reportedly in the process of trying to buy it. Cliqset We love a good technical standard and stream reader startup Cliqset is blazing new trails with its new real-time ActivityStreams feed normalization API . The API means activities from 70 different social services can be read in a common language and 3rd party services can slice and dice them to create new user experiences. Several high-profile applications have already begun consuming activity feeds republished through Cliqset and the company says many more consumers are in the works. This is the stuff that distributed, interoperable platforms are built on, where small innovators have access to economies of scale. Those are our picks! Check them out, let us know who we missed and get ready for a coming time when most of the web will be running in real time! Discuss

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Top 10 Real-Time Technologies of 2009

In our yearly wrap-ups of the best products of 2009 , we cannot but notice the shadow that falls over the editorial desk. We are chilled and saddened by the ghosts of the past year – the apps that should have been, the startups that failed to launch, the brilliant ideas that were throttled, the great minds that were fired, the tech heroes that committed tragic gaffes. But some failures were so monumental that they require specific enumeration and commentary. Here are the 10 worst tech failures of 2009. Sponsor Google Wave Sucked This is one case where the hype was as noisy as the app – and both were deafening. We have to hand it to Google’s publicity team; we don’t know one geek who wasn’t positively salivating for a Wave invite. The ReadWriteWeb back channel was a complete melee when the first invites were rolled out to team members. But once we got there and saw the new tech tricks, like watching one another type, we started thinking about use cases. And the more we struggled to understand and use this product, the more frustrated and bored we became. Blame it on the steep learning curve. Blame it on our misunderstanding the product. Mount whatever feeble defense you like, but techies know Wave was a flop. The TabletPads Went to the Deadpool All we wanted was a $200-500 flat piece of glass and plastic with some fancy gizmodgery inside so we could look at the Internet from the comfort of our couches. And what did we get? Rumors, Photoshopped gadget porn, promises – lies, all lies. We’d have been better off if we’d spent those months drawing the Yahoo! home page on an Etch-A-Sketch. Although the Crunchpad has resurfaced as the JooJoo , the price has been marked up considerably, and the whole project just seems wrong to us now. Moreover, five will get you ten that Michael Arrington, father of the Crunchpad and a former attorney, is fixing to get litigious right about now, which might significantly delay the product’s appearance on the market. Powerset Resurfaced as Bing In 2008, Powerset was one of the stealthiest, sexiest startups on the Silicon Valley block. About five minutes after launching, Powerset got snatched up by Microsoft to the tune of $100 million. When everyone had retrieved their dentures from the ground and changed their pants, they noticed that Powerset’s ever-so-sexy tech had been folded quietly into the Borg for assimilation. And about a year later, Bing was born, reportedly from the tech that Microsoft scraped off the infant carcass of Powerset. And Bing sucked. We had such high hopes. Twitter Failed to Innovate While some of us had our money on a Twitter sale in 2009, others were simply waiting for the company to debut a radical, interesting, mutually beneficial revenue model. At the very least, most users were hoping that the scalability issues and downtime that made Twitter the tragic heroine of 2008 would be put to rest. Twitter’s failures this year were less about the headlines they made than the ones they didn’t make. Rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, Twitter didn’t capitalize on their massive adoption increase (a.k.a., their Oprahtization) and sell. Worse yet, they didn’t buy. When one recalls the purchase of Summize and then contrasts it with this year’s explosion of excellent Twitter apps, one wonders why none of these small startups or one-off side projects were acquired. Perhaps this was a case of “Hey, we can do that!” as Twitter certainly seemed intent on pilfering features (such as lists and retweets) from third-party developers. Too bad the “official” Twitter features suck a lot more than the original third-party designs. But worst of all, we are still consistently experiencing downtime at a level that is unacceptable for any major web app. Google couldn’t get away with this kind of failure; why should Twitter be allowed to do so? The Great Firewall of China Drama Continued and Worsened To date, China’s “Golden Shield Project” restrictions on Internet use are throttling traffic from that country to websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Bing, and many, many more. Banned sites include news organizations that cover controversial events, pro-democracy sites and blogs, any site acknowledging the existence of Taiwan, YouTube, most blogging websites (WordPress, Blogger, etc.) and anything the government deems to be obscene or profane. In countries where creative self expression and the ability to browse, learn and make decisions independently are freedoms too often taken for granted, these restrictions are indeed unthinkable. The project began in 1998 and still made plenty of headlines this year for its renewed affronts to freedom on the Internet. For example, in June, the Chinese government announced it would be rolling out censorship software on every new computer sold in the country. Microsoft Dumped Don Dodge Not too long ago, we at ReadWriteWeb were shocked to learn from startup guru and longtime Microsoft ambassador Don Dodge that the Big M had given him the kiss-off. Dodge was seen by many as an intelligent, approachable personality in front of a huge, out-of-touch, unpopular brand. It was the tech industry equivalent of FOX cancelling the Simpsons. It’s been noted that Microsoft makes its paper from the enterprise, not startups, which would make Dodge a natural candidate for the chopping block. Still, the move was hugely criticized by bloggers, VCs and others. Microsoft’s PR plot thickened a few days later when Google snatched up the briefly unemployed Dodge. Spotify Didn’t Launch in the US… Yet It tops our list of Most Highly Anticipated Products Yankees Can’t Get Their Mitts On. Streaming music service Spotify is changing the world – with the exception of the United States. We’ve already got a crowded market of players here, including Pandora, Last.fm and Imeem. Call us greedy, but we want the new hotness that is Spotify, too. The Web 1.0 Comeback Campaigns Were Embarrassing to Watch Now, we at ReadWriteWeb have no desire to kick a company when it’s down, but a couple of the mastodons of the mid-nineties dotcom boom have been valiantly attempting to stage comebacks, some more successfully than others. Yahoo! did some good things for developers this year, but AOL/Aol’s rebranding was pitiful. And don’t get Dana Oshiro started on the affront to end-user dignity that is Friendster. Oracle Acquired MySQL Open-source geeks have been sporting metaphorical black armbands for the loss of MySQL, the world’s largest open-source database, to Oracle, the largest pay-to-play database, following that company’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. We reported last week that MySQL usage is expected to drop by around 10 percent over the next 5 years. Here’s another handy stat: Oracle also this year raised their own prices by 40 percent . Will MySQL remain free-as-in-beer and open source? Or will it succumb to corporate lameness? And the Worst Fail of 2009… LeapFish Made a God-Awful Promotional Video Tonight, we dine in hell! LeapFish’s bombastic promo clip (which you have to watch in 10-second segments to avoid waves of misplaced inspiration alternating with waves of nausea) is as horrifying as the company itself is sketchy . The startup says it made $10 million before it even launched, and the CEO Ben Behrouzi is an infamous contrepreneur with a background in lead generation and threatening employees . So, there you have it: our list of the worst tech-related disasters of 2009. What did we omit? Let us know in the comments below, and don’t hold back. Clearly, we didn’t. And to the companies mentioned in this report: 2009 isn’t over yet. You’ve still got three weeks to make it right with end users. Discuss

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Top 10 Failures of 2009

Google launched its version of integrated real-time search , one of a number of impressive product demos given, at a press event this morning. It’s much better than what Bing and Yahoo! have done , but it’s still just the beginning of a full-scale engagement with the real-time web. To provide further context to this discussion, we’re rerunning a post we wrote in seven months ago, titled ” 3 Models of Value in the Real-Time Web. ” We hope you find it useful and interesting. Sponsor Hey web DJ. Reach into your magic bag of search tools and pull out a big result – dripping with related ephemera born just moments ago. Those could hold the grain of information you’re really looking for, or they could sparkle with data that changes your course of action in unexpected ways. Alert! Another factor has emerged, elsewhere on another site. You said you wanted to be told, right away , about any online artifacts that crossed a threshold of popularity within a certain group of people in your field. That has just occurred, so it’s time to watch the replay of how it got so hot, evaluate its usefulness and decide whether to bring this emergent phenomenon into the work you were doing before you were interrupted, drop the former for the latter or return to your original focus. How would you like this to be your job description? It could well be – if the red hot Real Time Web keeps showing up on sites all around the internet. The Real Time Web is coming so fast we’ve hardly had any time to think about it yet. So let’s do that, shall we? The two hottest technologies online, Twitter and Facebook, are fast integrating real-time delivery of activity streams to their users. Paul Buchheit, the man who built the first versions of both Gmail and Adsense, says the real time web is going to be the next big thing . Buchheit’s FriendFeed is a key point of innovation in real time. Social media ping server Gnip promised to turn everything online into Instant Messaging-style XMPP feeds, and though that’s been put on hold in favor of more immediately clear value – we’ve still got our fingers crossed. Our investigation of companies like Bit.ly and OneRiot this morning turned up even more big news that’s right around the corner for the Real Time Web. But what’s the point? What’s in it for us, as users? We offer below three models of value that we suspect will be found in the Real Time Web. They are the concepts that underly the vision described above at the top of this post. Those concepts are Ambiance, Automation and Emergence . This is just an initial exploration of ideas, reality will undoubtedly be more complicated shortly. We welcome your participation in thinking about this part of the fast-approaching future of the web. Ambiance The web is made up of web pages linked together, but hovering around many of those pages are now social media signals like blog posts, bookmarks, tweets and other URLs that refer to a page but aren’t visible when you’re looking at it. The same is true for concepts. Most of us use Google to find pages about things we’re looking for, but Google prioritizes historical inbound links and the text on pages. In the above image you can see a custom search engine we use here at ReadWriteWeb, with Mark Carey’s Twitter on Google greasemonkey script running on top of it. If you want to know about streaming video, Forrester’s, Jeremiah Owyang, has a running list of vendors in the space (1) and that’s where you want to start – but wouldn’t you like to know about the very freshest (2) live streaming vendors on the market as well? That’s what people are talking about, in real time, on Twitter. In our experience these Twitter augmented search results are valuable because they are up to the minute – but sometimes they are also just better . Someday you’ll be able to discover Owyang’s list and be prompted to view the most recent, the most authoritative and the most “socially relevant to you” conversations about the same concept going on all around the web. People are working on all of that and as research-lovers we hope they succeed. The point is that no matter what you’re doing on the web, there are valuable related activities going on elsewhere – probably simultaneously. Exposing those is exciting. Automation We probably should have started out with this, but what’s the most obviously valuable example of clear value in real-time information delivery in recent internet history? Blackberry and the push email! We tend to assume that the real time web is something we’ll be looking at constantly, because it’s constantly bringing up new information. That doesn’t have to be the case, though. The real time web could very well just do its thing and notify us, in real time, of important events. Thresholds crossed. Simple changes made. For example, when the already controversial Google Chrome Terms of Service were changed again last December, I got an SMS sent to my phone notifying me that it had been changed. I was able to jump online, grab a screenshot of the changes from the application that was monitoring the document and report on the change before anyone else . I certainly wasn’t watching for the change. A robot was doing that for me and let me know about the change in near real time. It was pretty awesome, but it wasn’t real time and the services I patched together to do it are all marginal enough that they often don’t work or are very late. Put real time at the center of the web and we’ll be able to automate all kinds of information monitoring. At first it will be a competitive advantage for those who use it strategically; then it will just change the game, become standard practice and require competitive knowledge workers to come up with something else that’s new. Read the last section of this post and the comments readers left here: 3 Models of Value in the Real-Time Web Discuss

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What the Real-Time Web Can Deliver

Google unveiled its real-time search interface today and it looks much, much better than what rivals Yahoo and Bing have done so far. The new Google real-time search functionality will appear on selected search results pages, below News results, above or below top ranking natural search results – sometimes just above the fold of the page. The new type of results are well-integrated, unobtrusive, diverse in contents and formatted simply. It appears to be a job very well done. It’s hard to believe that neither Yahoo nor Bing have created an experience anywhere near as compelling. Sponsor Bing is a Bummer Bing’s “real-time search” comes in the form of a special page for Twitter results . On that page you see a tag cloud of popular terms on Twitter, links shared regarding those terms and a few recent tweets in which each link appeared. It’s not very visually appealing. In fact, it’s downright ugly. It’s also not integrated extensively into the main Bing site. Search results on Bing come only from Twitter and links share on Twitter. There are a lot of low-value retweets displayed. Twitter is of course just a small part of the real-time web. Yahoo is MIA Yahoo! on the other hand, displays Twitter as a tab in a select few news search results pages. That tab offers links being shared on Twitter, not tweets themselves. It’s very hard to find a search result that uses Twitter results, though, on Yahoo! Google Is The Winner So Far Google’s implementation, at least in this demonstration, brings real-time search front and center, displays commentary from Tweets, links being shared through a variety of channels and will soon display messages from MySpace and Facebook. It’s broader, the User Experience is better and it’s more prominent. Are There Still Alternatives? There are countless real-time search engines that have to be disappointed to see Google going its own way instead of acquiring a real-time search startup, and its unclear how many of those services still offer something unique that Google hasn’t now captured in this announcement. Aardvark is one and its now reported that Google is looking to buy that company. We’ll still await the full public roll-out of Google’s real-time search, its integration with the company’s new Social Search, with localization and personalization. So far it looks like Google has done what neither Yahoo! nor Bing have, though – create a compelling, serious real-time search experience. Discuss

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Google is Beating Bing & Yahoo Again, Now In Real-Time Search