Real-Time Search Engine CrowdEye Introduces New Ranking System

The “real time” is as popular as ever and there is already a large number of services ready to cater to the growing market. CrowdEye, a real-time search engine that may actually have a shot at getting ahead, is launching a new ranking algorithm for real-time searches, as well as a number of features designed to make it stand out from the crowd.

“Unlike the web, Twitter is fundamentally a social service,” CrowdEye’s Co-founder, Ken Moss, said. “By using CrowdEye Rank as a measure of a person’s influence on Twitter, we were able to build a set of unique and exciting features for our customers. There is a huge opportunity to advance the state of the art in search and browse by providing true relevance on top of social services like Twitter, and helping our customers actually make use of the phenomenal fire hose of data.”

For the moment, and the foreseeable future, real-time is Twitter, with the only likely competitor being Facebook, but the social network still has a lot of catching up to do. So, CrowdEye focuses on Twitter, as do the dozen or so competing products, with the newly introduced CrowdRank, which aims to disseminate what tweets are more “influential” and therefore do better in the search results.

Until now, searching on CrowdEye, just like Twitter's own search, brought up the most recent results for the query from the stream. But, with the new ranking system, results can be ordered by relevancy with tweets from the more influential people up top. Several factors come into determining a user's rank, with the most obvious ones being the number of followers and whether it is a verified account.

While Moss, who has been a lead engineer for Microsoft, won't go into that many details, he says other factors are considered, like how many times a post has been retweeted. Along with the new ranking system, which shows up next to the tweet author's avatar in the search results, CrowdEye has also introduced a new, personalized homepage and the possibility to follow a user from inside the search page.