Blogging Tips

Collecta is a unique search engine that allows you to view results in real-time. Collecta makes sure that you don’t received old, outdated results and only shows you what’s happening at that very moment.

The setup is very unique as well; there are three columns. The first colum is where the search box as well as your search terms appear. Searches are saved in tabs so if you have one search open and want to look for something else, you won’t lose your original search until you manually close it out.

For each tab there are also a few search options. You can choose whether or not to show stories (blog posts, articles), comments (on blog posts), updates (Twitter, Jaiku, Identica) or photos (Flickr) in your search results. This really comes in handy for pinpointing your results according to personal preference.

The middle column is where your results will appear in real-time. At the top you can see how many results have appeared in the last few minutes. You can even pause your results in case you need to catch up. You also have the ability to view older results.

The last column is where you can see a preview of your results. So, if you click on a tweet from your results, you’ll see the actual tweet in the preview column. You can then click the “read more” link to go to the actual site where the tweet or info exists.

Collecta is a different approach to searching and I really do love the concept. Though it does seem that Twitter greatly dominates the search results over blog posts, it only makes sense I guess. I definitely do feel like it’s a better alternative to Twitter Search and have already been using it on a regular basis.

Are there any other features you’d like to see integrated?