In addition to preparing for the launch of Bing, Microsoft’s much-hyped semantic search product slated to replace Live Search, the company has also announced a standalone product optimized for real-time web search. This offering includes Internet Explorer 8 bundled with search and webslices from OneRiot, a real-time social search engine we’ve written about in the past. Microsoft is also offering a real-time add-ons package that includes the same OneRiot products.
According to the IE Addons Gallery page, “This special version of Internet Explorer 8 comes loaded with fresh OneRiot goodies, putting the real-time web directly into your browser.”
Said OneRiot’s Tobias Peggs in an email tonight, “This new bundled browser that Microsoft is pushing is a big new step for us… It’s a vote of confidence in the way we index the web, the results we return, and our ability to scale- all good indicators.”
For users who have already installed IE8, Microsoft also offers three real-time add-on packages, which add the same OneRiot components contained in the fully optimized browser. Add-ons include OneRiot’s real-time search results, top videos, and top shared items of the day.
Here’s a composite screenshot of the webslices, featuring top shared results and top videos:
Users will notice the OneRiot search bar in the top right of the browser; the add-ons also give users the option of selecting OneRiot as the default search engine. OneRiot search results are indexed based on an algorithm that weighs the number of social media shares each link receives as well as the authority of the sharer, among other factors. OneRiot results are intended to be highly recent as well as highly relevant and include the exact number of shares along with the context of the share.
