Faroo Launches Real-Time Search Engine

I first met the founders of Germany-based search engine Faroo at Techcrunch40 in 2007. I enjoyed our chat and learning about their product which at the time was a P2P search engine.

This week they have launched a new search which they refer to as the, “Real-Time Social Discovery and Search”. Faroo notes that the new offering is a, “crowd-sourced approach to search, offering the discovery of new and relevant Web documents within minutes of their being published”

The new Faroo real-time search looks pretty interesting especially as you can’t attend a tech event without someone mentioning the concept of real-time search. Search results can be ordered by popularity or timeline. I can’t quite tell how they are getting their index as my startup post this morning shows a time of one-hour ago and a post on my startup’s blog this afternoon isn’t in their search results. I assume they are only indexing top and/or popular sources.

Some of the other features include:

• Tag search – refine your search based on a tag
• Preview – mouse over a result and see a visual preview before clicking to the destination
• Multi-language support – search results can include non-English language results
• RSS support – Users can subscribe to search results via RSS which can be useful for Google Reader and Friendfeed

You can also jump to search results on Wikipedia, Google, Bing, Yahoo, Technorati, Digg, Delicious, Flickr, YouTube.

My only concern is that they might consider rebranding to the “mashable real-time search engine” as nearly every page is overwhelmed with Mashable posts. If they are using Twitter as a backbone for search results then I guess it makes sense as Mashable gets a ton of retweets and shares partly due to their default list status. (side note, I would say the same thing if it was any other blog as well)

I’d caution Faroo and all other real-time search engines to be careful to be viewed as only showing news from one source or one category. We’ve seen this with other search engines and it seems that their staying power is typically reduced when not showing a good level of diversity — not just tech news and certainly not just news from one source. This is one of the pain points as using a service like Twitter which will always feature the most active users.

For example, where is the news about the plane that was hijacked in Mexico? You only see it if you switch to timeline view and reduce the time to 1 hour – I’d suggest that the default results start with the most current results, not the most popular.