Kurrently, a new search engine that combines Twitter and Facebook status updates into one blazing fast stream, launched recently, and from what we can see, it might just put its competitors to shame if it can scale.
Developed in three weeks by Gilbert Leung (who according to Jay Baer apparently is now interning at Microsoft), the self-refreshing combined search results have three speeds – slow, fast and halt. We tried a variety of searches and all of them returned relevant results (see screenshot below). One of the most interesting things about the Facebook integration is how robust it is in bringing in links that are shared on the social network, including associated thumbnails.
We’ll say it flat out – with a caveat of it not having been tested against server strain – Kurrently’s dead-simple search engine is right now the best we’ve seen for real-time keyword search on Facebook and Twitter. Kurrently beats Twitter search (of course there is no Facebook integration there), Google / Bing’s integration of social search or Topsy when it comes to aggregating in real-time. That said, for historical searches, Topsy is still the best option to us.
Oh, and we love the name as well (and can’t wait for a Kurrently-Klout partnership)! Here’s some results for “iPhone”:
h/t Sage Brennan
Is halt turned on by default? I think it’d be a bit annoying to have it refreshing while you’re reading it for the first time.
Slow is set as default, and it’s actually slow enough that you can read the top results pretty thoroughly. I personally didn’t find it distracting, and would argue that it’s the right decision as otherwise first-time visitors might think it’s more static than it is.
Looks pretty interesting to me…
Yes, very interesting indeed, but as I said the real test is in scale, but right now it certainly is pretty snappy and relevant.
Hey Chad,
With the current functionalities, scalability shouldn’t be a problem. The technical explanation is that the service is running on Google App Engine and the search requests are made on the client side.
To clarify further:
If there are going to be any scaling issues, it would likely be Twitter / Facebook’s problems rather than Kurrently’s.