I have been involved with Search Strategy over the years and when we look at Search history it seems like as quickly as there is a leader that holds the ultimate reign, depending on the evolution of the web at that time, there is a strong possibility for that leader to loose the throne.  Even thought it all started with Yahoo and their great directory structure, then came along  AltaVista.  Although there were many others, with the power of syndication, relevancy and page-rank we saw Google take front place in the Search Market for the last decade.   Until now even though we are seeing new players like Bing making their mark, there are a variety of other entrants that are moving forward.  However, Google has stayed clearly #1.   Even though the Web has evolved from Web to Web2.0, now Web3.0, it seemed to be a Google World Wide Web.

Now with the recent annoucements of the new platform API’s from Facebook we are potentially looking at a completely new cycle of the Web called the Social Web.  Is this Web 4.0???  I have been trying to get my head around this progression, and I found that if we look at the flow of context and the 5W’s ( What, Where, Who, When, Why) there may be some hint in the overall progression of Search along this evolution.  Maybe the internet as well is in someway following this progression of context?  At the end of the day, the automatic answer of  ”Why is the User really searching in the first place” is a definite challenge that many platforms have been trying to solve with recommendation Answer Engines, but maybe the technology, the web and the timing is just not right to get this perfect yet.    Here is a brief summary of context and the 5W’s from what has been swirling around in my mind.    At this time it really appears that we guiding along the evolution of  ”When”.

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WHAT ( 1995~): What you are looking For? A  strong paradigm from the 90′s from the standpoint of web search and the emergence of vertical search.

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WHERE (2003~): Where are you are looking for some thing?  This strong  paradigm that started with the local directories ( IYP’s or Yellowpages) that basically had platforms with two search boxes.  This was revolutionized by Google and other to majors with one-search box pulling it together.  This evolved quite quickly from the early 2000′s and has become a major modifier for search today.  It is a very strong parameter that will be key to all search traffic on mobile.

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WHO ( 2009~): Who is looking for that item and the relevancy of Social?  For the first time in history Facebook is having its “Google Moment” as described by Michael Arrington in his Article titled- The Age of Facebook.  He described and I quote,

” In a talk a few days ago investor Ron Conway spoke about the explosive growth of Facebook. “They are the universe,” he said. I asked him if we are in the Age of Facebook. His answer was yes. Ron has been investing in startups for thirty years and he has seen the rise and fall of many companies. This wasn’t just idle chatter.

Microsoft dominated the technology world in the 90s on the back of their Windows and Office products. Google was the champion for the last decade after perfecting the business model around search. Both are still huge companies.

But all the momentum is behind Facebook and how they are changing the Web, and our culture.

Last week Facebook unveiled a variety of new developer tools, and new consumer applications are set to be launched in the near future. What’s most interesting about these changes aren’t the debates about whether what Facebook is doing is good for the Internet or not, or how open or not open their solutions are.

Those debates are important but they don’t affect the Facebook revolution any more than debates about Adsense a decade ago affected the decade of glory that Google just experienced. The fact is that Facebook is permeating the Web. Publishers, us included, are clamoring to organize our websites in ways that please Facebook.

Their vision of an open graph of people and things (with Facebook at the center) is becoming reality, and debates by technologists won’t changes that. Facebook is taking over our identity and we are going along with that happily. It will take a new technology paradigm to disrupt what Facebook is doing.”

Facebook’s Pageview’s have now superseded Google’s pageviews to be #1 in North America for Internet Traffic and with the latest Social Web links tied all to users is really demonstrating a power shift to “Who” and the content they create that can be linked and shared in many different circumstances.  Even though the power players behind “What” and “Where” are still evolving, this piece to the puzzle has been added and it makes for an interesting shift in the game of Search as well.

So what is next…… this is where I think we see something very interesting with Twitter and ” When” or there might evolve a new game in town. The “When” Search Engine will evolve that will combine the facets above and create a new momentum.   It is clearly possible for all of the majors now ( Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook)  to move and capture the “When” as it is evolving, but there is again opportunity for others.  Even though new start-ups like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and others have been accelerating with their own index and unique user-interfaces building up  around “the data base of places” that combines What, Where, Who;  the key in my mind for the next wave seems to be clearly “the When”.  It was stated recently by ( could not find it correctly on Twitter- so I guess there still is the problem) about the evolution from Real-Time Search to the Context of Right-Time Search.

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WHEN ( from 2010~2012~): As information and micro-conversations explode in real time,  getting the latest information is one of the paradigms of the latest Real-Time Search Engines.  But the attribute of the Right-Time is something that is evolving to be a key driver in the evolution of Search.

As this has only started and Real/Right-time search is at its initial stages of growth, I did some research and looked at all the different Right-time Start-ups and companies listed in Crunch Base.  Here is a list of all the Right/Real-time search engines they list today.  Besides the work going on with many of the majors there are approximately 50 start-ups listed.  They are listed at the bottom of this article in Alphabetical order.

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WHY ( 2015 and beyond):  To me this final piece makes the ultimate Search Engine.  It knows “Why you are searching and can give you the right answer at the right time, at the right place, with the right links to all of your social graph and friends- the Who…..  I believe it will take years before we see this working perfectly, and it might evolve around the time linguistic enablers are in place for the perfect Voice Search.   This intelligent six-sense and search will then complete the picture of search and the 5W’s.

-  End of Post-

[Reference:  The Real and Right-Time Search Engines battling it out today]

NAME/LINK	OVERVIEW
allofcraigs	Advanced Craigslist site search and real-time Twitter stream.
BackType	BackType is a real-time, conversational search engine that lets you see what people are saying about topics that interest you. BackType’s technology indexes and connects millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media….
Correct Theory, Inc.	Correct Theory, Inc. is founded by two college professors in 2009. The main purpose of the company is to mine vast amount of social data and apply them for semantic information discovery. The current goal of the company is to provide a search service…
Craave	Craave is a refined search engine helping you find more while searching less.
Delver	Delver is an intelligent social search engine that enables you to find, experience and benefit from the wealth of information created and referenced by your social world.
Factery	Factery.net mines real-time feeds and web content for the purpose of providing simple, short answers to user queries.
FAROO	FAROO is a peer-to-peer web search engine that has no centralized index and crawler. Each web page visited by users is automatically included into the distributed index. Ranking of search results is based on a distributed usage statistics of the web…
Faxo	Faxo was incorporated in 2004 by Steven Urciuoli and was officially launched July 31, 2009. In the few months it has been online it has quickly evolved into a global Internet brand with features such as personalized home page, search, metasearch,…
Feedmil	Feedmil is a real-time feed search engine featuring a spam-free, topic-focused search for a variety of live streams from blogs, microblogs, podcasts, as well as public and social media. Feedmil’s goal is to help people search feeds of their…
Highnote	Highnote is a real time search engine, or a “discovery engine.”
Hurdan	Hurdan is a comprehensive information discovery and management website that includes feeds (RSS and Atom), news, searching, sharing and blogging among others.
IceRocket	IceRocket is a real-time search engine based out of Dallas, Texas. They have a special focus on displaying the most up to the second results. Search results include: blogs, Tweets, news and images all in real-time. IceRocket’s top blog search tools…
InHopeOfLove	InHopeOfLove is a search engine for women and aims to attract users that are interested in a more feminine search experience.
itpints	itpints is a real-time web search engine.
Kngine	Kngine is Web 3.0 Search engine designed to provide meaningful search results.
LiveHit	LiveHit is a core social discovery service built upon the foundation of real-time data intelligence, enabling Partners to track and manage how users are interacting with popular content and any live event on their site live in the moment
Mahalo	Mahalo is a human powered search engine founded by Silicon Valley veteran entrepreneur Jason Calacanis. Results are generated non-algorithmically by a team of profile builders who create pages for search terms. Mahalo includes the most appropriate…
Moore Laboratories	Since 2006 Moore Laboratories experimented with recommendation technology’s, computational linguistics and data-mining. In 2007 they introduced the recommendation technology Moore, at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris. The company is self-funded.
Mozzler	Mozzler is a real-time search engine that allows users to build news streams and share them with friends.
MSE360	MSE360 provides a unique search experience using a 3 tier layout system and unique Ajax interaction. Powered by several API’s MSE360 does not demand the user select one content type, but rather provides Blogs, Wikipedia, Images, Web & Job results on…
NachoFoto	NachoFoto, a “real time” popular image search engine , helps users find the latest images of anything which is currently popular in the world.
Offeretti	Offeretti is a search engine for offers, coupons, promotions, special deals, discounts and bargains from local retail businesses.
OneRiot	OneRiot is the leading realtime web search engine, and the first marketplace for advertising on the realtime web. A growing number of third-party search engines, websites, and mobile applications show their users realtime search results, and realtime…
OOYYO	OOYYO is the global vertical search platform for used cars. OOYYO improves the online shopping experience and helps users find the best match on the Internet for their needs.
Oparla	Oparla is a search engine based on a different advertising revenue stream than competitors. Unlike Google, Oparla will not be charging its advertisers on a cost per click basic, but instead a fixed monthly rate to advertise on its search engine,…
Oriango	Oriango aims to be the dictionary of contents on the Web. Oriango was created to present a new form in the system of presenting search results, making the users its only relevance. The user chooses the content that corresponds to his/her research,…
Pubsub/Pulse	Real-time RSS Search Engine
PicFog	PicFog is real-time search engine. It shows pictures posted to photo hosting services like TwitPic, Yfrog and Twitgoo in real-time, as they’re posted.
QueryCAT	QueryCAT is the web’s largest database of frequently asked questions. QueryCAT searches the web for FAQs, automatically extracting questions and ranking the answers to help you find the information you are looking for.
Rafinko	Rafinko provides a way to interconnect social media by crowd-sourcing data entry and using behavioral mapping to determine relevance.
Relegence	Relegence sells subscription-based services that offer real-time discovery, notification and delivery of information, connecting customers to cross-media content from remote locations.
Scoofers	Scoofers is a search engine that gives a blend of google customized search results, based on Delicious, Connotea, Digg, Yahoo directories and Stumbleupon.
Scour	Scour is a social search engine that “scours” multiple other search engines, with the goal of offering the most relevant search results. This is achieved through a combination of proven search algorithms and real user feedback….
Search The Tail	Search The Tail takes Google a step further by allowing users to narrow their search results by using either popular keywords or obscure terms. The keyword list, namely Google Tail, is in order of popularity, but one can also choose to have it…
Search3	Search3 allows you to search Google, Yahoo, Live, Twitter and eBay and display any three as columns of results for comparison. In essense searching search.
SearchMerge	SearchMerge is a real-time social search engine that allows users to fetch search results from Google, Twitter, Last.FM, Vimeo, FriendFeed and more – all at the same time.
Similarr	Similarr is web search engine which allows post messages about any search query.
SnappyFingers	SnappyFingers is a Question and Answer search engine. It crawls and indexes FAQs spread across the Internet, and provides search results in a easy to view Question/Answer format. While most visitors use the site for finding answers, few have also…
Snirch	Snirch is an expert-powered search recommendation engine that is focused on providing superior results for the world’s most important and monetizable search queries. For contributors, Snirch empowers users to build, promote and monetize their own…
Sperse!	Sperse! was founded in 2008 by Shiv Kapoor and Amar Chugg. The founders have been most recognized for implementing some unique features that differentiate the Meta Search Engine from other major Search Engines.
Status Search	Status Search is a new kind of social graph search engine which allows you to preform searches on your friend in Facebook and Twitter. You might prefer calling it a social status search engine.
surchur	surchur.com gives you a dashboard to the latest social media, blogs, pictures, and videos for a given topic – surchur is the portal to the “now!” on the web.
tracx	tracx is a pioneer in social media campaign management targeted at advertising agencies and brand professionals.
Vizu	Vizu is the leading online brand advertising measurement system. Our Ad Catalyst real-time measurement infrastructure for assessing ad campaign effectiveness provides powerful benefits for publishers and advertisers. Through the use of Ad Catalyst,…
Wowd	Wowd is a real-time search engine for discovering what’s popular on the web right now.
YouPage Ltd	YouPage is a Social Search service to help people Find, Engage and Express opinion with Friends, Businesses and Events Organisers online.
zanswerz knowledge search	zanswerz is a knowledge search engine.
Zhift	Zhift is a forums search engine, where you can search forums from all over the world.
zygella	Zygella allows advertisers to achieve a professional and effective presence on the web and has grown into a real-time short ads service.