Have you heard the buzz in the news and media growing by the day about this industry?

Well if you are a business owner, offline or online then you must know…

Traditional Search Vs. Real-Time Search: What’s the difference and who are the major players your business must know about!

Whether you are already doing business online or are researching how to enter the arena, it is critical to know what the difference between traditional search and real-time search is and who the major palyers are.

Lets start with traditional search…

Traditional search is something you’ve probably experienced a couple hundred times if not thousands of times in the past few months.

You go to a search engine, type in what you’re looking for, hit “search” and then dig through the results until you find what you’re looking for. The search results are typically static content that was written in the past weeks, months or even years. Maybe the last few days if it was posted to a blog or press release.

The dominant player here is Google, a household name that has actually formed into its own verb “Googled”.

Trailing in a distant 2nd and 3rd are Yahoo and Bing.

Now lets look at real-time search…

In steps Twitter, the 800 lb. (and growing) gorilla in the room that has most people dazed and confused but eager to join in fear of missing the next big thing.

Real-time search, or Twitter as it’s called has the same steps as traditional search but a much different result.

It works like this: You go to Twitter.com, type in what you’re looking for, and hit “search”.

Now instead of receiving back proffesionally published content that is days or X number of years old, you receive back snippets of Twitter conversations that contain the keyword you searched for. And instead of content being days or weeks old you get back content that is minutes or even seconds old!

In addition, the results are typically unedited, unbiased, and amatuer feedback, reviews or discussions.

This is incredibly powerful and important to businesses of all kinds because of the extreme amount of market research, customer relations, reputation management and personal communication you can do.

The important part to recognize is that traditional search and real-time search focus on 2 different markets and neither is superior to the other.

Both offer a wide world of opportunity for the entrepreneur and business owner.