Google Too Slow For You? There's An Alternative (And It's Not Bing)
Collecta, which launched the beta of its realtime search engine Thursday, could find itself lost in the Sturm und Drang of the Google-Microsoft wars. Then again, Collecta could benefit in that it is entering the market at a time when Web surfers, besieged by Microsoft's Bing advertising campaign, may be more open to trying out alternatives to Google.
The Collecta realtime search engine scans the Internet, searching through news stories, micro-blogging sites such as Twitter and Jaiku, the Flickr photo site and other sources.
A user can leave multiple searches running simultaneously to receive a continuous stream of results, somewhat similar to what TweetDeck does on Twitter, only using many sources. This morning, for example, "Obama" and "fly" topped the list of queries, offering up a list of blogs and comments on the widely seen video of the U.S. president's fly-swatting incident during an interview earlier this week. Users can also filter which sources they want to search from.
"The Web is alive with realtime information. So why search a stale archive?" says a note on Collecta's home page.
Collecta, which is all of six months old, is gaining visibility, in part, because the company is led by Gerry Campbell, former vice president of search at AOL and a former president of search and content at the Reuters news agency.
The Collecta launch wasn't without its hiccups. Later Wednesday, some queries returned no search results but the company said in a blog post Thursday that "we are working as fast as we can to get things working smoothly again." Friday, however, the site seemed to be functioning more properly.