SAN FRANCISCO, CA - There's a new race in the Internet search business and, like most races, it's about speed.

Start-ups including LeapFish, Factery and Aardvark hope to lap the field by supplementing conventional search results, such as what you'd find on Google, with instant access to social networks including Twitter.

"This is going to become mainstream very fast," says Sean Suchter, general manager of the search technology center at Microsoft. "Everybody in the world is going to expect that they can find out anything, anywhere, instantly."

Last month, Google and Microsoft's Bing signed deals that give them access to Twitter's public postings, called tweets.

Yahoo is working with start-up OneRiot and others to display real-time search results.

To keep users from being overwhelmed, firms sort results by their relevance to what you're searching for, timeliness and, in some cases, the expertise of the source, says Nick Halstead, CEO of Tweetmeme, the No. 2 real-time search site after Twitter.

Real-time searches are mostly for Web users who want to know "what's being tweeted, what people are talking about," says Danny Sullivan, editor of the blog Search Engine Land.

That can be important for people tracking unfolding news events. But that audience may be small.

"Most people don't have this burning need for immediate, precise results unless it's the Iran elections or Michael Jackson's death," says Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Marketing Intelligence.

The new companies say that they offer more than speed. LeapFish, which launches this week, says it's the first site that lets consumers both contribute and search for information in audio and video as well as text.

Factery will launch a site in mid-November that enables users to pose questions to people in social networks who may give immediate answers.

"Old-fashioned search engines just don't work in this real-time (Web) world," says co-founder and President Paul Pedersen. "People are looking for recommendations from those who they know and trust."

Aardvark uses a similar strategy. It enables anyone on Facebook, Twitter or instant-messaging services to ask questions about any topic and get a live answer within minutes.

"Consider Aardvark your very own brain trust of experts," says Damon Horowitz, Aardvark's co-founder and chief technology officer.

The new services are confident that the market can support them. Search "is a huge driver of online traffic, shopping, content discovery," says David Berkowitz, senior director of emerging media and innovation at digital-marketing agency 360i.

Copyright 2009 USA Today. All rights reserved. From http://www.usatoday.com. By Jon Swartz.
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