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There’s been a lot of talk recently about the “real time web” or the “social web,” and how through services like Twitter and Digg search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are becoming less relevant in finding up to date information.  A few search engines have noticed this and have begun to produce real time results in line with social networking sites.  Having to travel to the websites to view them defeats the purpose, which is why OneRiot is releasing an open API.

OneRiot is a real time search engine that crawls Twitter, Digg, and other social networks to find the most up to date (or second) information for searches.  The API will allow OneRiot’s searches to be embedded in any number of applications, whether they be web apps or Twitter/social network desktop clients.  The API will allow for realtime search results which functions similar to Twitter’s search, but there’s also what OneRiot calls PulseRank, which is an algorithm for “PageRank for the realtime web.”  Possibly more interesting is the fact that it also has a trending topics list, which not only covers Twitter, but Digg and other social sites as well, which can prove interesting.  What makes it nice is that, at least as of this writing, there are no hastags that don’t really mean anything (hashtags are both a blessing and a curse, and can be annoying at times).

OneRiot’s API release comes just after Twitter announced that it has a total of over 11,000 apps built with its API, which is quite impressive.  If OneRiot can get into at least half of them, it would surely be good for them.  While the merits of a real time search engine can be greatly argued, it must be at least better than Twitter Search.  With Eventbox and bDule integrating OneRiot today, it’s certainly a start.

Read [OneRiot]