FriendFeed Antes Up with Real-Time Search

Everyone is talking about real-time search and everyone is getting into real-time search. Google just added some related features to its Blog Search and now FriendFeed, half social network half social news aggregator, launches a new real-time search feature. The site has been recently re-designed to automatically show updates from your friends and with the new search it is poised to actually deliver on the real-time promise than many other sites make these days.

“Just enter a search query as you always have, and see new results instantly stream in at the top of your screen in real-time. No need to constantly click refresh. It's an extremely useful (not to mention mesmerizing) way to immediately see what people are saying about a particular topic. You can search across just your friends or all of FriendFeed, including imported services like blogs and Twitter accounts,” Jim Norris wrote on the FriendFeed blog.

FriendFeed was already one of the best places to keep with what's being said on a topic across a great number of platforms and services, but with the new search it became the one to beat when it comes to real-time information. The search itself works very much like other similar real-time search engines, automatically adding content as it comes in. There is a pause button of course as it can be difficult to keep up with some of the more popular topics. Also a cool feature is the possibility to embed the searches in any site or blog.

But, while the way FriendFeed currently works has allowed it to deploy the new real-time features with relative ease, if it is going to stay ahead of the game it will start to actively index and import content from social networks or other aggregator sites, even from those that don't currently have a FriendFeed account.