My main points were about the branching off of the Live Web from the Static Web, and that we can see this not only in the evolution and viatality of pure Live Web search engines such as Technorati and IceRocket, but in partitioning of new live search services from traditional static web search services by Google and Yahoo. That they call almost zero attention to their Live Web engines is interesting less because the Live Web is relatively low-priority for them than because they choose to keep them separate.

I’m actually *glad* they don’t include Live search in with their Static search, because I think it would stifle innovation by new engines. Including their own.

It is quite difficult to build a real-time updated search engine, and the basic technology of how to design and engineer a solution in this space is quite different from google or yahoo search. The biggest real-time-update search engine is eBay, where a new item is listed and is indexed into the search engine immediately. For most items there is a delay of a few seconds to a minute or so depending upon how busy the site is. Of course any suspicious item is made invisible until there has been time for a full trust and safety check, but it is indexed immediately.

Several years ago ebay evaluated all the available search engine technology and none were able to do real time updates, so an in house solution was developed.

Is there a real unmet need for a large scale real time blog search? I use bloglines to read my blogs, I’m not sure how much delay it introduces, but it doesn’t seem like a big issue to me. If someone had up to the second blog search would it draw an audience?

Disclosure: I work for eBay.

You do a search, you takes your chances. Just be sure to be on the lookout for people who give a damn about getting it right. Especially when they disagree with you.

And I agree with Doc on the small things. Over at American Digest Gerard posted about a movie he saw, and a lesson it taught him. As he quoted the movie, “There’s never nothing going on.” Gerard then went on to write about a walk he made around his neighborhood, and all he saw and heard during it. Overall one of his better posts.

Could you imagine if everyone pinged Technorati each time they typed a single character on their blogs? Wouldn’t that have the makings of a DOS attack.

Maybe I’m hearing this wrong.

What’s the premium in having something live? I’ll listen to Doc’s keynote when he publishes it as an mp3. Granted, when you’re physically present, you might have an opportunity to ask a question, but that can be done via e-mail later.

What should be live is the viewers’ responses. Imagine a cable news network that scrolled randomly selected viewer responses to what was being shown at that moment. Chances are, most would say, “Haven’t you done this story to death already?” I’ll pull your content if you let me push my opinions.

Also, live searching does not to ensure a better quality of the message received. Rumors will just be able to travel faster.