Streaming real-time search company Collecta announced today that it has secured additional funding, to the tune of $4.7 million, from Dace Ventures and previous investor, True. Prior investment already totaled $1.85 million.
The company delivers streaming news, via widgets, APIs and its Site Search Platform, to partners. It intends to use the infusion to build out its team and establish more partnerships, according to Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell. Past partnerships have included CNET's coverage of the iPad launch and MySpace's Today on MySpace feature.
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"We've got a solid team and have spent time building a scalable infrastructure," Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell told us in a phone conversation. "Now, Collecta is more than a great idea. We understand the business behavior of our users and we'll be building out a full-fledged business."
Campbell anticipates adding personnel in business development, program management and ad sales - the latter because one of the major initiatives on deck is the creation of a full-fledged advertising system.
We've mentioned in previous coverage that when we tested Collecta, the news it streamed from 15 million content sources was in fact less than a minute old, and that its widget is freely available for anyone to use in their website.
Collecta says that 60% of queries it sees come in via its partner API. OneRiot, its main competitor, says it sees 97% of its queries that way.
Collecta is notable because it forms explicit partnerships with publishers, such as WordPress, and stream their content into the index in real time.
OneRiot focuses more on P2P indexing with the use of their installed toolbar and indexing Twitter & Digg. They also recently launched an ad network.
Real-time searches also tend to shy away from many normal search parameters: big on entertainment and very low on porn.
Read more ReadWriteWeb coverage of Collecta. ReadWriteWeb's real-time web coverage is here.
Disclosure: In addition to announcing a new round of funding, Collecta is also an event sponsor of this week's Real-Time Web Summit.