We’re big fans of TapTu here at Symbian-Guru, and are pretty pumped about the latest update to this cool mobile-friendly search engine. TapTu has saddled up with OneRiot to add real-time results to its popular search engine. If you don’t know exactly what that means, don’t worry, our friend Dennis at WAPreview.com has a nice little synopsis:
Google is pretty quick at updating its index. I typically find that my own posts show up in Google within about an hour and searches for specific breaking national or international news stories return something relevant in Google as soon as the story hits major news sites. But that’s not real-time search.
“Real-Time Search” is more of a Web 2.0 codeword than a metric of actual search engine speediness. It refers to searching the “Real-Time Web”, which is another codeword that mostly means “Twitter”. The idea is that people constantly Tweet about stuff as soon as they see or hear of it and that a 140 character Tweet only takes seconds to compose, unlike an AP news item, for example, that might take 15 minutes to write, edit and post to the wire. Recently Twitter, and to a lesser extent sites like Facebook and Digg, have been scooping major news organizations with the first reports of events like the Iranian election protests, September’s Indonesian earthquake and the TWA Hudson river crash. The message is that if you want to find out what’s happening in the world, follow Twitter not CNN.
So, basically, ‘real-time web’ search results favor time-based matches over keyword-based matches. In any case, TapTu has it now, and it’s optimized to use from your phone, which rocks. What’s better is that I’ve noticed, unlike other companies, TapTu seems to recognize Symbian-powered touchscreen phones have roughly the same capabilities in their browser as the iPhone and Android devices – as such, you don’t need to use any URL-trickery to get the nice touch-friendly version on the N97, 5800 XpressMusic, or i8910, for instance.
Best of all, it’s free, so give it a go. The next time you’re out and about and need info on something, try checking TapTu instead of Google – you may be surprised at how much more helpful and relevant the results are.
