Search

The real-time search arena, fueled by the popularity of Twitter, continues to heat up. Collecta is the latest and most visually appealing stab at getting real-time search right. It draws on images, articles, blog comments and microblogs for data, and refreshes automatically. The layout is a cool three-column affair, with filters on the right, live results in the middle, and a preview of your selected result on the right.

The ability to filter out different kinds of results is useful. Sometimes you just want to see photos or articles, and ignore all the Twitter, Identica and Jaiku chatter, or vice versa. Twitter is really the core of these real-time search sites, though, and Collecta is no different. It’s got Twitter’s trending topics on the front page. In terms of speed, Collecta is faster than the competitors I’ve tried out. If you’ve got a hankering for real-time search, this looks like the site to check out at the moment.