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!

The search giant began rolling out updates earlier this week that it says will increase the relevancy and depth of search results. According to Google, the new features “bring search results to life” through a real-time content stream aggregating the most relevant updates from microblogging platforms like Twitter and FriendFeed as well as news articles and blog posts as they are published.

Google is fueling real-time results through partnerships with Twitter (a relationship announced in October), Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Indenti.ca.

For example, if you’re a Notre Dame fan looking for the latest info on the hunt for a new coach – and breaking news about the prospective hiring of Cincinnati’s Brian Kelly – you could utilize Google’s “Latest News” feature to peruse updates as they happen. Results on this page include tweets, blog posts, comments and updates from other social microblogging platforms like FriendFeed.

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This feature, which acts somewhat like a custom news ticker, allows searchers to create a real-time feed of live updates pertaining to their topic of interest. You can also specify which type of real-time results you want to see – for example, by selecting the “Updates” option you can view only results aggregated from microblogs.

Even for Google users not specifically looking for real-time updates, this content now frequently appears in search results. When searching for the movie “Sherlock Holmes,” for example, a box of real-time search results appears within the list of natural results. And the listings here update, often every couple of seconds for a hot topic, as long as someone stays on that page of search listings. Google’s relevancy algorithms determine where to rank the real-time results compared to all of the other results on the page; for some queries, the real-time results rank first, making them the most prominent listings on the page.

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Google is compiling its most popular real-time topics into the “hot topics” function within Google Trends.

With these updates Google has accounted for mobile searchers in addition to those using the Web. The “Latest News” and “Updates” features are designed for display on the iPhone and Android devices – so that searchers can access real-time results on the fly.

If marketers didn’t pay attention to real-time search before, now is a great time to get started. Google may tinker with how prominently it ranks real-time results, but at a minimum, one can expect that such results will be a mainstay of Google’s index. As more people and brands contribute public status updates across social media platforms, and as those updates come more frequently, Google will only have more such content to draw from.

This doesn’t mean every marketer should instantly hop on Twitter and Facebook and any lifecasting service they read about in Mashable, though registering brand names to prevent others from cybersquatting is always prudent, even when you have no plans for using the account. The first step is to monitor how real-time results affect your overall search presence, though note that even if real-time content doesn’t appear today, it might tomorrow.

More importantly, marketers will need to decide how they want to be part of the conversations that are happening. If they represent brands that people are talking about often in positive contexts, there is the opportunity to join and respond to these conversations to amplify the beneficial buzz. If they work with brands that attract a lot of negative chatter, they may look for ways to follow up with such consumers offline while funneling the feedback to customer service, research & development, human resources, or other internal parties as appropriate.

If there isn’t much conversation in real-time results, which will often be the case, then it will be beneficial for marketers to explore why this is the case. Is it because the brand is part of an industry that just isn’t discussed much in normal discourse? Do people talk about the activities they’re doing (such as laundry or sailing) without talking about the brands they’re using (like the kind of detergent or sailboat)? There are many strategies for helping brands stand out in such contexts, some of which are discussed in 360i’s Social Marketing Playbook, and ultimately marketers should see this as one more opportunity, just as Google’s arrival a decade ago as an important search engine presented marketers with a new opportunity to gain more visibility among their target audiences.

-Katie Perry, Corporate Marketing Coordinator, contributed to this report.