360i Q&A with OneRiot’s Tobias Peggs

People have long been turning to the web to find information — and as social and mobile continue to gain momentum, this trend will only increase. More and more of today’s searchers want late-breaking information that answers their queries with the greatest relevancy. In other words, they want the engines to tell them what’s going on right now for a given topic.

Search engines have responded to this demand by incorporating real-time search results into their offerings. One engine leading the way is OneRiot, a real-time search engine that provides results influenced by what people are sharing on Twitter, Myspace, Digg, Facebook and more. We interviewed Tobias Peggs, President of OneRiot, to learn more about the engine and the future of real-time search.

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[360i]: Since OneRiot launched, the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) have incorporated more real-time search functionality. How will OneRiot compete against them and stand out?

[Tobias Peggs]: Across all search engines, studies have shown that 40% of users’ queries are best served by realtime search results. These satisfy users searching for things as heavyweight as “Oil Spill” or as entertaining as “Lindsay Lohan.” Those users are expecting their search engine to tell them what’s going on right now for that topic. That’s exactly what OneRiot provides. We find the news, stories and videos that are really resonating with people right now for any topic. In addition we offer a partner API that enables 3rd party search engines to show our results to their users. We also operate the RiotWise network specifically for monetizing realtime search results – both on our own site and our partners’ properties.

Because the market opportunity is so big – 40% of search volume – it’s been no surprise to see the majors figuring out their own realtime search strategy. Some are now showing simple tweets at the top of their search result pages while others have separate sites that show tweets and Facebook status updates related to a search query. Others are working with our partner API (unfortunately we can’t say who at this time).

Whatever the approach, the key thing is to deliver real user value, to drive engagement and be able to monetize that attention. We are doing two things to stay ahead: 1) keep executing to deliver a service that adds real user value and 2) keep partnering to get our products out there to as many people as possible. In other words, we’re delivering real value at scale.

When does real-time search matter most for users?

When users want to know what’s going right now. If I’m searching for “Oil Spill” right now, I probably don’t want to find a Wikipedia page listing all the big oil spills that occurred in the 20^th century. That’s what I would get on a traditional search engine. Instead, what I want is the news, stories and videos that are relevant for right now. “Tell me what’s going on with the BP oil spill, right now!”Likewise for “Volcano,” “Michel Jackson,” “Hudson River,” “Iran Election” – all great examples of where users in their millions sought search results that could tell them what was going on right now.

Of course, in addition to these global topics, there is a big demand for realtime results on a local scale (“what’s going on in my city right now?”) and even hyper-local (“why has the traffic stopped at junction 241 right now?). Although there are different optimal solutions for each of these types of queries, the underlying point is that realtime search results matter most when you want to find out what’s going on right now for any subject.

Why should marketers pay attention to the growing influence of the real-time web?

The “realtime web” has brought with it the biggest shake up in the Search Industry for a decade, and marketers will need to change too.

Historically, the big search engines were based on an exhaustive index of all the pages on the web. They then determined the relevance of each page, and ranked their search results, based on factors like the number of in-bound links to that page. This document-centric approach treated the web like a big reference library. Top results were authoritative but static. Search for “BP” and the top result would be the official BP website or a Wikipedia page for the oil company. Marketers have been learning how to work with this system for many years now with SEO and SEM techniques. They know how to get content ranked high and found on a search results page. And while those efforts are still valuable, marketers will now also have to learn to optimize for the realtime web.

Rather than exhaustively indexing the web based on link structure, realtime search engines like OneRiot index the pages that matter most to people right now. We do this with a people-centric view of the web, based on “social signals” – the content that users are sharing because it’s interesting or important to them at any moment. For example, links that are currently being shared by friends on services like Twitter and MySpace, or “liked” on Facebook, reflect what’s resonating with people right now. At OneRiot we index those pages in realtime. Then we rank our results in order to reflect current social resonance of a particular web page – what we call the “Pulse” of that page. This means looking at realtime social signals, rather than inbound links, to determine how relevant a page is right now. We’ll look at factors like the Velocity of Social Syndication (i.e. how fast is a link being shared right now across the web) and People Authority (i.e. who is sharing a link and how influential are they) to help determine our top result.

So, just as marketers had to figure out SEO and SEM techniques to rank high on library-style web search, they’ll now need to develop new techniques to rank high on realtime web searches.

You recently unveiled a new look & feel to OneRiot. How did you decide which elements to change? What are some of the coolest features to the redesign?

One of the coolest features added to the redesign are the trending topics that now stream across the top of the home page. These topics are driven by a new Trending Topics Engine (http://bit.ly/TrendingTopics) which detects breaking stories and emerging trends faster than anyone else.

While OneRiot is known as the leader in realtime search, we’re also blazing a trail by monetizing the realtime web. We do this with RiotWise – the first ad network for the realtime web ecosystem. We now feature RiotWise content on our homepage and SERPs. (http://live.oneriot.com/company/ads.html)

These design changes not only help make the realtime search experience more engaging, they also build a compelling showcase for realtime search and ads to our OneRiot partners. The majority of OneRiot action occurs on partner sites through our API (http://oneriotdevelopernetwork.com/), so it was important for us to build a site that showcased what partner can do with our content.

Which story currently trending on OneRiot intrigues you most?

The product guy in me is always looking at how fast we find new trending topics, and how fast we surface relevant content. I’m always pleased when we break a story first on our home page, or surface really buzzy content on our search results pages – and I’m intrigued to know which part of our trending topics detection engine found it first.

The business guy in me is always looking at search queries and trending topics that generate great quality ads and good ad coverage. So I guess I’m most intrigued by the rare instances when that doesn’t happen, and I want to know how we can make it better next time!

Meanwhile, the Englishman in me is most focused on the Soccer World Cup right now, and how my team is doing. So I keep a tab open on a OneRiot realtime search results page for “England World Cup” and watch the realtime results roll in for England’s chances. To be honest, I’m more intrigued about the state of my team than any search technology for this one!