OneRiot, the real time web search engine, has added MySpace user content to its aggregated search results. The MySpace content comes from users updating their public profiles, along with other publicly shared information such as shared links and media. The news comes with MySpace’s announcement of its new Real-Time Stream API, which made its debut this morning at LeWeb Conference in Paris, France.
What the MySpace real time search API does is give other third parties access to public MySpace user content. The positing of this content in search engines expands the distribution of that content, making it more visible and accessible across the web. While MySpace has yielded high search engine ranking for its public profile pages for some time, the incorporation of real time content is riding MySpace’s hopes of taking things to the next level.
After waning traffic, decreasing deals with search engine giants like Google and an undeniable necessity to shift its focus as a large and prominent social network, MySpace has taken to trendier ways in which to leverage the content shared by its users. Real time search data began to take off through the use of Twitter’s APIs, as they gave a glimpse into what the world is discussing at any given moment, for any given topic.
Facebook quickly jumped onto this trend, offering up its data for Microsoft Bing’s new search engine, as well as for Google, though its Google deal is less inclusive than what it offered investor Microsoft. Nevertheless, social networks are really beginning to flex their muscles with the offering up of publicly shared profile information, indicating the underlying value it could provide for the likes of search results placed in a time-related context.
There are still issues surrounding real time search data, such as the overwhelming amount of content that gets pushed through a set of search results and the necessity to still filter and rank the data. On MySpace’s part, this could add to obstacles the social network will have to deal with in appealing to third parties as well as its users.
As MySpace is not one of the first places you think to go for updating your status, the ability for the social network to dominate in terms of real time search results is also in question. Of course, there are still millions of users on MySpace, so anything we consider for the volume of MySpace’s potential for real time search results is relative to what we’ve seen from Twitter and Facebook.
For OneRiot’s purposes, this search engine has remained among the leaders of third pary search engines pushing the real time trend. What OneRiot has done is shift its focus with the changing times in order to reflect consumer demand and the ability for social networks to contribute to a larger take on web search. OneRiot has set out to index the web in a different way, adding a better perspective on the context of time.
What began as a Twitter-specific real time search engine has expanded across the web, taking advantage of blogs and other forms of time-related web search. The offering up of APIs from social networks for the use of real time search results makes things easier for OneRiot, as it continues to span as many social media outlets as possible for its aggregated search tool.
