Google in 1998
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About 100 years ago, you would have to wait for a newspaper to get the news or go to the library to look up information. And the information you found was limited to the reach of your local newspaper and the amount of books your library could afford to carry. Another option was to be where the news happened or go to a city with a bigger library.

Being where the news happens was impossible. Not so much any more. Every week, new stories are broken by someone using Twitter. You can track trends in Twitter by using TwitScoop and know most of the story before Google picks it up, let alone a newspaper. If you are using Google Trends to track hot stories, you are at least an hour late if not later.

You see, Google has an advantage and a disadvantage: it indexes everything. Good for being exhaustive. Bad for being now. Indexing takes time. To save time, Google builds more data centers to process the data faster. I can write a post and have it in Google’s index in less than a hour, so they are getting pretty fast, but I can also tweet something, go directly to twitter search as fast as I can click and find what I just tweeted.

Most new things happen on blogs and social networks these days. The chance of a story hitting CNN before it hits Twitter or another network is pretty low. The chance that any  news network picks up the tweet before one of the millions or bloggers do is slim also. And they will usually break the news on their blog and/or a social network.

To get these stories and to be at the forefront of what is going on, you have to beat Google. Another way would be just to index those sites where the newest things happen first.

Before Google, there were a few search engines that claimed to be on top. Then came meta search engines that collected the results of various search engines and presented then all in one place. They were meant to fill in the gaps and give you more accurate results. It seems now is the time for MetaSearch 2.0 and the new meta search engines are searching social networks:

Samepoint Social Conversation Search

SamePoint.com is presently tracking millions of conversations, taking place across in more than tens of thousands blogs and social media sites. User-generated discussions are typically not indexed by major search engines, such as Google, as they do not reside on static pages. SamePoint.com converts these discussions into web pages, or permalinks, and organizes them within a tag cloud.

Daymix

Daymix shows the latest information on any topic. Description, talk, news, blogs, photos, videos, related sections, everything all in one place.

WhosTalkin

WhosTalkin.com is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics that they care about most. Whether it be your favorite sport, favorite food, celebrity, or your company’s brand name; Whostalkin.com can help you join in on the conversations that you care about most.

SocialMention

Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services.

FastEagle

Fasteagle is a web workspace presenting an editorial selection of websites and search tools in a convenient interface. Direct online contents and are fully browseable and displayed inside a frame. Unlike most startpages like myYahoo, Netvibes or iGoogle, Fasteagle does not aggregates RSS, feeds or widgets; instead, it directly links to actual content or conveniently displayed inside our site.

Directory 23

This one is my creation, currently being created. I thought I would added the feature of an exportable OPML file so that searches don’t have to be run over and over. Instead, you can subscribe to them. That feature is still coming.

Addictomatic

Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on.

And for the fastest search, go directly to Twitter. Here are a few sites that will show you trends in Twitter hours before Google catches on:

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