My favorite mobile search engine, Taptu, added a new option today – “real-time” search. So what is real time search and how is it different from plain old search?

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.

Taptu is getting its real-time results from OneRiot which searches Twitter and Digg to find breaking news and buzz. Rather than linking directly to Tweets and Diggs, OneRiot looks for the most shared links within them. A OneRiot search result looks a lot like one from Google or Bing, a list of links to and descriptions of content from a wide variety of web sources.

At least initially, Taptu’s One Riot powered real-time search (labeled “Buzz”) is only available on the iPhone and Android devices, at least officially. I found that Taptu’s iPhone/Android start page can be accessed using any browser at taptu.com/home. It works very well in Opera Mini 4.2 (images above) and 5.0. It also works in the Nokia browser on my N95, with some minor layout issues. Taptu’s real-time search enabled iPhone version, which has a page size of around 40 KB and doesn’t require JavaScript, should be at least functional, if not pretty, in the vast majority of mobile browsers. It looks best on devices having good CSS support and screens at least 320px wide.

Filed in: Wap Review Directory – Search/Web Search

Ratings: Content Usability

Ready.mobi Score: 4 “Good”

Mobile Link: taptu.com/home/