What differentiates your search from Twitter's? Perhaps merging technologies like PowerTwitter does for Firefox might be cool - actually doing the shorturl conversion to page titles, displaying images and video inline, etc.

Hi Douglas. I work at OneRiot - so firstly thanks for the comment! I'll answer the differentiation question.

First, let’s start by stating that there is a growing appetite to consume search results from the realtime web. Traditional search engines just can’t keep up any more! The “interesting stuff” increasingly lies in what our friends and other people are saying, sharing and looking at online. Simply because of the way that traditional search engines index the web (requiring pages to build up variations of PageRank over time before they appear in search results) they struggle to surface fresh, socially-relevant search results. That’s the hole (and it’s a big one!) that realtime web search services like OneRiot are filling.

Now, given its current – and justified – buzz, Twitter Search tends to be peoples’ first port of call to consume search results from the real time web. If you search for something like “Oprah” on Twitter (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Oprah) you’ll see an explosion of conversation from thousands of people in relation to that query – which is pretty exciting to see. In other words, Twitter Search surfaces the *conversation*. Your results experience is essentially telling you “Your query is a hot term! Lots of people are talking about it!”. If you parse through, or join, the conversation, you might find out why.

If you do that same search on OneRiot, the experience is quite different (http://twitter.oneriot.com/search?q=Oprah). OneRiot’s Twitter search surfaces the *content* that people are talking about right now. Your results experience is essentially telling you “Check out this page, or blog, or video! Lots of people are talking about it!”.

In other words, it’s a good compliment. Use Twitter search to find the *conversation*. Use OneRiot’s Twitter search to find the *content* that people are talking about.

I'll continue in the next comment...

Now, of course, seeing – and joining – the conversation is a key piece of Twitter’s appeal. So you’ll also notice with OneRiot’s Twitter Search that we *do* show the conversation as well – but we group the tweets that have shared a link to a specific piece of content. (Of course, we de-dup all the shortening services for you… so links from bit.ly, tiny.url, tr.im etc that point to the same piece of content are treated as one by OneRiot).

So what’s the difference here?

Well, from Twitter Search you could join a worldwide fast flowing conversation about Oprah. From OneRiot’s Twitter search you could join a targeted conversation about a specific piece of content – for example, a YouTube video showing @ev on Oprah (this is the top search result on OneRiot as I write… of course, because this the realtime web, it’ll probably be different when you look).

Hope this is helpful

Tobias