Real time search is at its most powerful when it comes to breaking news. And I often find myself filtering the results to get to the photos. A picture is worth a thousand words and real time images from the oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico or the soccer world championship in South Africa is a powerful way to plug into what’s happening.

No real time image search at Google

With the recent addition of the sidebar tools, it is easy to filter your Google search to get the most recent results or to get images, but once you have chosen to see only images, the option to filter by time disappears. So Google doesn’t do real time image search.

Collecta

Collecta is among my favorite real time search engines. It is easy to use and offers a number of filtering options (in the left margin, right below the search box and your query):

• Stories (blog posts, articles)
• Comments on blog posts
• Updates (Twitter, Jaiku, Identica)
• Photos (Flickr, TwitPic, yFrog)
• Videos (YouTube, Ustream)

Nachophoto

Nachophoto is a real time photo search engine that launched in April. Like all good real time search engines, they offer trending topics. The search results hold a lot of information:

You get sets of 20 photos, the most recent at the top and then more sets below of more recent photos, sorted by source and time stamped. My favorite feature is a time slider at the top. Drag the slider to determine the time range. Nachophoto will get photos as old as one month. There is an rss stream from each search, so you can subscribe to new photos in your favorite rss reader.
Filtering by photos and videos, you get a great visual representation of recent events.

Why real time image search?

Nachophoto founder Anuj Agarwal sent us a case study showing the relevance of real time image search. The search term used was ‘iPad’. This was the 4th most popular term searched on internet on the day iPad was launched on 3rd April.

The keyword has undergone a series of semantic changes: A Nachofoto search for ‘iPad’ around 27th Jan showed images of Steve Jobs announcing the iPad. On April 3rd, an early morning search displayed images of crowds queuing up for the iPad outside the Apple store.

Shortly after 9 am the same day, the search term produced images of people checking out the iPad at the Apple store. Around noon on same day, you could see pictures of people unboxing their brand new iPads.

Search results for the same query on a standard image search engine remained same, missing the development that took place around iPad.

An intro to Nachophoto

photo credit: mikebaird